Tell us about yourself
I’m a visual projects editor at The Guardian in the UK. As a visual journalist, making maps is part of my job, but I’ve always been a bit of a jack of all trades, and I love learning new tools that help me tell visually led stories. I fell in love with maps during the pandemic, when two things happened at once.
First, I discovered raster files, and I was amazed by how a single pixel of data could reveal so much about a place—its altitude, temperature, depth… Then I found out that my great-great-great-grandfather, Manuel María Paz, was a watercolour artist and cartographer who worked with Agustín Codazzi on the Chorographic Expedition in Colombia—a scientific mission in the 1850s to describe the country’s geography. I took that as a sign!
Tell us the story behind your map
I’m Colombian, but I’ve lived in London for 25 years. The first time I flew back home and saw the mountains from my aeroplane window, my heart skipped a beat. That’s when I realised how much I missed having them as my constant backdrop, and how geography had shaped me. My city, Bogotá, is surrounded by mountains; they’re both our point of reference and our horizon. I ended up writing a map story about that feeling.
Some time later, I was asked by my former colleagues at the BBC to give a presentation on how to create 3D maps using QGIS. I downloaded a DEM of Colombia’s majestic Cordillera de los Andes, but of course my laptop couldn’t handle it and refused to render for ages. Miraculously, it worked five minutes before the presentation, just in time. As I navigated the model live, I suddenly saw the deep valley of the River Magdalena cutting between the two branches of the Cordillera, and Bogotá perched high in the mountains with a view of it all, the snowy Nevado del Ruiz in the distance. I got emotional remembering that, on very clear days, you could actually see the Nevado.
When I saw a call for submissions for the GeoHipster calendar (I’ve had one hanging in my kitchen for a couple of years), I thought it would be lovely to share that feeling, and to celebrate how maps can express experiences I once thought could only be captured with words.
Tell us about the tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map
I made the image using Blender, a DEM file, and satellite imagery, rendered at an oblique angle. The work was inspired by a blog post by data visualiser Robert Simmon, who wrote that viewing Earth from an oblique angle “reveals the form of a landscape and acts as a bridge between our lived experience and abstract data.”
In the end, every map is also a celebration of the generosity of the mapmaking community and its culture of sharing knowledge.