The origin, in a question made by a Nobel laureate
The basis for the ideation of the project has been this paper. Thanks to it, strategic points have already been identified in Galicia and Portugal for the observation of the last continental sunsets. In the framework of this project, this work on the last sunsets, and their spiritual and historical coincidence, will be linked to the Galician Finisterre, French Finisterre, Land’s End in the United Kingdom and the corresponding points in Ireland and Norway, and will seek to refine the places in other geographies where this particular event takes place. An event that only takes place in certain extreme locations on the continent and the islands and with a very specific seasonality, thus turning this phenomenon into a spectacle that attracts more and more tourists every year, attracted by the growing demand for astro-tourism, with the intrinsic component of the sustainability of this modality.
This was the question:
Richard R. Ernst, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1991, posed a question during a visit with Jorge Mira to Fisterra in 2006, while contemplating the Sun setting on the horizon of the Atlantic ocean:
“Fisterra was considered the end of the world (Finis Terrae) in times of the Roman Empire, but, is this the point where you can see the last sunset on the continent?”
Mira’s initial answer was “no”, but he soon realized that, due to the changing orientation of the Earth’s axis of rotation, the answer was not so obvious. He began to investigate, with the above-mentioned results. By the way, in the end the Romans were not entirely wrong: from March 24th to April 23rd and from August 18th to September 19th, the sun dies over the area limited by Cape Fisterra and Cape Touriñán.