Did you know that Google Maps offers you the possibility of traveling to the past? It's fast and it's easy, although you won't be able to travel to the time your grandparents lived either. This must be clear from the beginning, lest you be disappointed. As you know, Google offers a complementary service to its maps called Google Street View and that allows us to see the streets, squares and buildings through real photographs. In fact, we are sure that on more than one occasion you will have seen the famous Google car driving through the streets of your town or city. Google is updating the photographs it has posted on Street Viewperiodically, as the car collects new images of the places. Do not lose sight of the fact that things change a lot in a short time and where there was a beautiful grove, now it may look like a mass of cement. If you feel nostalgic or just want to know what a certain place was like years ago, Google Street View offers you the opportunity to remember it.
1. The only thing you have to do to see what a place was like in the past is to access the street of the city of your choice. For example, we have gone to Calle Mayor in Madrid , one of the busiest places in the country. The Street View car has been there at least seven times. We say it because from this same perspective we have up to seven snapshots captured in 2008, 2012, 2013, 2014 (two), 2015 and 2016 .
2. To see how many images there are of the place you have chosen and travel to the past, you have to press the small clock that appears in the upper left part of the page, right next to the name of the street you have searched for (inside the gray box Dark).
3. Clicking on it will open a small window in which you will see the current photograph of the street, but which will also allow you to visit each of the snapshots that have been taken during the last eight years, which is when Google launched the project from Street View and the first images began to be published.
4. You can go from one year to another easily and apply the photograph of the year you want by pressing the magnifying glass, to visit the place a few years before. It is clear that in streets as central as this one, the changes will be insignificant: a new store, different cars, other people ... The real changes will be found in areas outside the center or in very specific spaces, which have also undergone important modifications.
Too bad that time travel can not be given a little further back. It would not be bad if Google could offer us old images of the most emblematic places, such as the Plaza Real in Barcelona or the Puerta del Sol in Madrid . It would be an interesting documentation task that Google could carry out without problems, as it has done with different works of art. And you, what year would you like to travel to? Did you find anything interesting among those snapshots? Let us know in the comments!