The knowledge visually-impaired people have of the space around them is a subject of great interest to the scientific community. This article describes a school programme and the effect it had on the environmental knowledge of the school where it was carried out. A group of sighted students chose as a project to construct, with the author's help, a tactile-visual model of the area around the school. The model was constructed entirely by the students in the group. This was followed by a study to investigate the environmental knowledge of the area represented in the model of, primarily, the visually-impaired students and, secondarily, of the sighted students. The first stage involved an investigation of the area before a reading of the model, and the second stage involved a repetition of the investigation after the students had studied the model. The article presents an analysis and comparison of the results of the two stages, together with a number of conclusions concerning the environmental knowledge of visually-impaired people. (Contains 2 figures.)