OSINT Newsletter #31 — Geolocation Challenge
I’m really loving these GeoLoc challenges in the weekly newsletter. In this post, I’ll show you how I tackled a recent, beginner-friendly challenge! Like many challenges of this kind, the tasks are to find the city in which this was taken along with the specific coordinates.
An initial scan with my own eyes (and brain) gave me the impression that this is probably somewhere in South America. Having watched enough telenovelas from the continent, this sort of townscape made me think of either Colombia or Peru. A simple hunch based off views reminiscent of scenes in my favorite Netflix shows wasn’t enough, but what else could I hone in on? The most searchable thing I could locate within the image was the sky-colored sign with red text. Zooming in on it a little bit made it clear enough to me that the red text reads “Los Angeles de Jesus y Maria” I couldn’t make out what the rainbow-colored word is, but the blue word that follows looked like “Primaria” to me. I figured that these words combined should provide a good starting point.
Luckily, a search query of “Los Angeles de Jesus y Maria Primaria” lead me straight this nifty little website which features a table of useful information, including the city (town/localidad in this case, which is Los Olvios) and the coordinates (-11.9467, -77.0762). However, I still wanted to find it on Google Maps for verification. Since the name of the school isn’t labeled on Google Maps, I referred back to the aforementioned table, paying special attention to the “Dirección” (Spanish for “address”). Calle 7 Puerto de Pro gave me something to work with, so I plugged it into G-Maps, dropped the pegman on Calle 7 and strolled the street until I found the school and verified the surrounding architecture.
Thanks for reading and feel free to follow! :)
