# Press Release — Mosaic-23 Xara

**For immediate release · May 2026**

## A new world map projection from Catalonia challenges the way schools teach geography

Real Earth presents **Mosaic-23 Xara**, an original cartographic projection that displays the entire planet — Antarctica included — in a rectangular format with each continent shown at its real size. A personal, independent initiative offering an alternative to the distortions of Mercator and other traditional projections.

### What it is

Mosaic-23 Xara is a world map composed of **23 pieces** (6 main continents and 17 sub-regions). Unlike conventional maps — which apply a single mathematical transformation to the whole sphere — this proposal projects each piece **from its own geographic centroid**. The result: zero distortion within each continent, and a view of the world where Africa regains its real size (14 times larger than Greenland) and Antarctica appears as a continent in its own right, not as a strip at the bottom of the map.

### What it brings

Compared to classic and contemporary projections, Mosaic-23 stands out for:

- **Antarctica visible and to scale**, neither stretched (Mercator) nor flattened (Gall-Peters).
- **Continents with their real shape**, without vertical stretching or horizontal distortion.
- **Conventional rectangular format**, immediately readable, with no interruptions or unfolding.
- **America–Asia axis preserved**, retaining the cognitive familiarity of most world maps.
- **Division into recognizable geographic units** (India, Arabia, Madagascar...), not arbitrary triangles or icosahedra as in other alternative proposals (AuthaGraph, Dymaxion).

### A humanistic, not mathematical, proposal

> "My goal was to square the circle: see the planet printed on a sheet of paper at real sizes. I started from the problems I noticed as a map user, not from prior teams of cartographers. The work has been laborious and largely manual — someone will surely refine it computationally. To me, it mattered to arrive there from a personal and pragmatic standpoint."

The author, Xara, is an independent practitioner who approached the project from scratch, without academic cartographic training, deliberately seeking new solutions before reviewing existing ones.

### Availability

The resulting maps are published under **CC BY-SA 4.0**: free use for schools, textbooks, press, exhibitions, and any non-profit or educational project. Available at high resolution in several visual variants (Classic, Terra, Relief, Negative, and more) at [realearth.cat](https://realearth.cat).

### What for

The author aims for Mosaic-23 to become a viable alternative to Mercator in classrooms, helping correct the distorted mental image that generations of students have inherited from a projection designed in 1569 for maritime navigation. The proposal is open to collaboration with educational publishers, schools, and cultural institutions.

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**About Real Earth** — Independent personal initiative exploring and sharing new ways to represent the planet on 2D maps, free from political bias and faithful to geography. Web: [realearth.cat](https://realearth.cat).

**Contact**: [contacte@realearth.cat](mailto:contacte@realearth.cat)

**Other works by the author**: [xkno.cat](https://xkno.cat)

**Visuals**: high-resolution images available in the `images/` folder of this press kit, free for editorial use with credit "Real Earth · Mosaic-23 Xara".
