Tracking the American space program on Gran Canaria

Our coach went past the Maspalomas station at the southern end of Gran Canaria. We were told that it was used to track American space missions in the 1960s. A little research shows that it was built for the Mercury project, the first American human space flights. You can see the bases they used here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Tracking_network. The orbits themselves are interesting. The mission illustrated did 6 orbits and only one went over Gran Canaria. The orbit is a wavy line on the map as a projection from 3D onto 2D and then that the Earth is tilted at 23 degrees. Orbits took 88 minutes so must have been low. Coming back to the start of the orbit after an hour and a half, the Earth had turned through about 20 degrees and the town on the ground underneath would not be the same, hence the lines don't repeat.