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How did Leonardo Da Vinci make a satellite map more than 500 years ago?In 1502, Leonardo da Vinci arrived in the city of Imola, Italy to work for César Borgia as a military engineer. His task was to help Borgia become familiar with the place, but instead of making a map like those of the time, with artistic ornamnts and a side view of the city, Leonardo made a modern map, surprisingly accurate and with a top-down view of the city. Imola. An image very similar to the one we can see today in satellite photos of the old town of the city, and with which the genius of the Renaissance was several centuries ahead of his time, demonstrating a marvelous symbolic imagination.Leonardo described Imola with an ichnographic plan, an idea inspired by the Roman engineer Vitruvius that allows the observer to stand directly above a building to obtain a clear image of what they are seeing. But Leonardo did not describe one building, but all those in the city, using his engineering knowledge to achieve a clear map of the city.Judging from the sketches that were preserved of the map, it was deduced that he used some type of disk with a pointer to measure degrees, marking the angles of the streets in relation to a stable point, north. It is believed that he used a compass to record the orientation of the city walls. Establishing a scale required measurng the distance between all of these angles, possibly doing so on foot or with a spinning wheel odometer. Using the angles and distance of each corner of the city, he was able to create a complete plan hundreds of years before anyone could check if it was correct.Despite its precision, Leonardo's map is not exempt from artistic license, which could be inherited from previous studies. But even with those licenses, the map goes beyond representing a city and marks the transition from a geography of myths and perceptions to a geography of information, drawn in a simple way. It was a map ahead of its time.