Meet Antonio: The mysterious Alberta town nobody's heard of

The Weather Network

Is there a made-up Alberta town on The Weather Network’s maps and radar?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been getting messages from Weather Network viewers asking about ‘Antonio’, which shows up on Alberta forecast maps east of Lethbridge.

“Just wondering why all of the towns in my region … include[s] Antonio in the regional map?” One viewer tweeted at us in late January.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Then, on Facebook, another viewer wrote to tell us ‘Antonio’ made the local newspaper.

“There is a section in the Lethbridge Herald newspaper for locals to roast concerns or toast good news,” she wrote.

“You received a roast!”

She goes on to say her friends at the seniors centre where she resides had a “good laugh” over the Antonio debacle, which has become a hot topic of conversation.

It turns out Antonio has a lot of credentials for a town nobody has ever heard of, including its own forecast page on our website as well as its own postal code (T0K 1X0).

So what’s up with Antonio, and why is it on Weather Network maps and radar?

“Our location data come from one of our data suppliers, they have over 250,000 named locations in Canada.” explains Jim Saini, director of Geographical Information Systems for The Weather Network.

“Antonio can be found on Google Maps and also on Wikipedia as a locality of Municipality District of Taber.”

But Saini says he agrees with our viewers, and will look to change “Antonio” to another location that is “more recognizable with a larger population base” in the weeks to come.

In short: It looks like Antonio’s days are numbered, at least on our website.

Our sleuthing didn’t turn up much information, however, there was one reader of the Lethbridge Herald that apparently could back up the maps’ assertion that Antonio was, indeed, a real place, at least once upon a time. From Herald reader William B. Turnbull:

“This place was originally a railway siding halfway between the villages of Grassy Lake and Purple Springs, on Highway 3. In about 1912, a one-room school was built there just south of the siding, where the local children including my mother and her other siblings attended.

“In the Grassy Lake-Purple Springs Faded Trails history book it says that as many as 35 pupils attended at any one time, with Mr. George Murphy as its first trustee, and Waldo Sherburne its last treasurer. It also states that the school closed around 1927 and was moved south of Taber to become the Hungarian Hall.”

With 250,000 named locations on our maps, there’s bound to be a few more oddities peppered across the country. If you come across any other towns like Alberta, let us know in the comments.