The Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya keeps an extraordinary thing: a near-complete aerial record of the whole country, flight by flight, going back to the end of the Second World War. Their Ull del temps (“eye of time”) viewer lets you stand over any point in Catalunya and scroll through the decades. So I pointed it at our own roof.

What follows is every orthophoto flight the ICGC has that actually covers Cal Penedes, from the 1946 postwar survey to last summer — twenty-eight in all. Each frame is the same ~500 m square, centred on the house, so the land holds still and only time moves. Click any year to enlarge it.

Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1946 1946 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1956 1956 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1977 1977 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1984 1984 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1990 1990 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1993 1993 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 1994 1994 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2000 2000 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2004 2004 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2006 2006 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2008 2008 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2009 2009 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2010 2010 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2011 2011 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2012 2012 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2013 2013 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2014 2014 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2015 2015 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2016 2016 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2017 2017 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2018 2018 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2019 2019 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2020 2020 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2021 2021 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2022 2022 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2023 2023 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2024 2024 Aerial orthophoto of Cal Penedes, 2025 2025

What to look for

The story these pictures tell is exactly the one the documents only hint at in a short history of Cal Penedes.

  • 1946–1977 — the house sits alone at the southern edge of the Pla del Mas Roig, the big cereal plain that fills the top of every frame. The regular stippling in the 1946 and 1956 images is rows of olive and almond trees; the dry-stone field walls and terraces are still sharp. The circular barraca is in the field just north of the house, where it still is today.
  • 1984–2000 — the Can Prat urbanisation arrives. The land that Mas Prat sold off in the late 1970s fills in with streets and houses along the bottom of the frame, creeping up towards us decade by decade. By 2000 the swimming pools have appeared.
  • 2009 onwards — annual colour flights at 25 cm resolution. From here the changes are subtler: the Pla del Mas Roig cycles through its crop rotation (bare earth, green, gold) year to year, individual trees come and go, and the slow tidemark of the urbanisation finishes filling its plots.

The two oddly soft frames — 1990 and 1993 — are genuine: those are the only flights of that era that reach our point, and both were shot at 2.5 m resolution rather than the 25–50 cm of their neighbours. The gaps are real too. There is no usable 1960s coverage here, and the long stretch between 1984 and 1993 yields only those two blurry frames.

How these were made

Each image is a single GetMap request to the ICGC’s Ortofoto territorial WMS, centred on Cal Penedes (41.6376° N, 1.8138° E / UTM 31N 401202, 4610215) with a 500 m bounding box. Where a year was only published as a multi-year mosaic, I asked the service for the actual flight date at our exact coordinates with GetFeatureInfo, so every frame is labelled by the day it was really flown, not by the name of the layer. Adjacent layers that turned out to be the same flight were dropped.

Orthophotos: Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC), used under CC BY 4.0. Browse them yourself in Ull del temps.