Nosara is a popular tourist destination in the Central American country of Costa Rica. In this lab I was asked to redesign a map of Nosara aiming to appeal to American surfers and to include only 10 point features. I thank Michigan State University and Nosara Travel & Rentals for this map.
Here’s the original map:
And here’s the map I made:
As you can see I made some changes. Two of the point features I chose for the lab are not on the original map. I located them on Google Maps after reading about them on TripAdvisor. I also visited the websites of all of these point features (except the “Gas Station”) as well as many of the places that didn’t make the cut.
I also excluded some of the polygons. I determined that American surfers aren’t likely to need to know where the school is or FUCAN (which I discovered is a local trade school). I also decided that the “Library” and “Soccer Field” features were unnecessary. I kept the clinic, the police station, the post office, and the bus station as these features seemed more important to an American tourist.
I also removed “Nosara Travel”. Not that it’s not a good feature, but it’s just not a good polygon feature, and being limited to 10 point features it just didn’t make the cut.
I made some changes to the roads based on what I saw on Google Maps. For instance “EBAIS/Health Clinic” is south of a road in Google Maps so I made it so in my map. I also noticed the road past the bridge over “Rio Nosara” branched into two directions and so included that on the map.
This was the final lab. Hope you have enjoyed this blog!
You will most likely see me again once I have something interesting and cartography-related to blog about. Or maybe I will start another blog and then I will make a post on here telling you where you can read my new blog.
Thank you all.
Andrew Miller's Cartography 