The Big Mystery Why in the world would anyone go to a place where the land is so rugged it's nearly impossible to travel the wildlife is likely to kill you and if you survive you have a good chance of getting a terrible disease But what if going there means you have a chance to unearth an amazing treasure And to have the thrill of discovering something no one else could find For a very long time both of those reasons compelled people to risk their lives searching Honduras's La Mosquitia rain forest The goal was to find the ruins of the legendary Lost City Native peoples called Ciudad Blanca White City in Spanish What's known of this Lost City comes from the stories passed down through generations by the Honduran Pech and Tawahka peoples They spoke of a city that was struck by catastrophe and everyone living there fled The stories of the Lost City intertwine with tales from the 1500s about Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés's failed search for a Central American city full of gold So the Lost City was imagined to be full of treasure These stories warned that anyone who finds the Lost City and takes anything away will soon have something terrible happen to them But even that threat can't overcome the double lure of possibly finding treasure and being the one to find the famed Lost City in La Mosquitia Steve Elkins left and an expedition team that included Douglas Preston center Honduran soldiers and a number of others went into La Mosquitia in search of the legendary Lost City in 2015
Introduction to La Mosquitia La Mosquitia is the largest tropical wilderness in Central America Covering 20,000 square miles 51,800 sq km along the easternmost part of Honduras and extending into Nicaragua it's far from any cities and spreads across incredibly challenging terrain This includes lush swamps fast flowing rivers roaring waterfalls rugged mountains deep ravines grassy savannas and forests so dense sunlight barely penetrates As if all of this doesn't make the area challenging enough La Mosquitia receives on average 10 feet 3 m of rainfall a year Besides fueling intense plant growth this rain causes flooding and landslides It also turns dirt into mud so fluid that anyone stepping in it sinks deep And La Mosquitia is infested with venomous snakes including the most dangerous venomous snake in Central America the fer de lance Bites from the rain forest's sand flies are also likely to inject parasites causing leishmaniasis leesh muh NEYE uh sis -a disease that can cause sores on the skin or damage to internal organs GUATEMALA In fact it is La Mosquitia's extreme wildness and dangers rather than laws or barriers that have kept it largely uninhabited and unexplored EL SALVADOR HONDURAS La Mosquitia watershed PACIFIC OCEAN Tegucigalpa Mosquitia Patrimonial Heritage Preserve NICARAGUA Miles 20 40 60 40 80 Kilometers La Mosquitia was named for the Miskito people native to the area Caribbean Sea PACIFIC O ATLANTIC OCEAN C OCEAN North America HONDURAS ATLANT Caribbean Sea South America OCEAN
The Long Search Although many unreported expeditions may have taken place the earliest records of treks into La Mosquitia in search of the Lost City date from 1924 through 1934. These expeditions located some archaeological sites or physical remains of people living there in the ancient past and recovered pottery and tools But no one on those expeditions believed they had discovered Ciudad Blanca That's because no golden treasure was found And the sites weren't built of white stones which was how the stories described the famous Lost City The public wasn't very excited about searches for an ancient city in La Mosquitia until a 1940 expedition by US explorer Theodore Morde Morde spent four months in the wild Honduran rain forest and returned with a collection of thousands of stone artifacts or human made objects He also claimed he'd seen evidence of gold silver and platinum in the area where he'd found a ruined walled city Could he have discovered the legendary Ciudad Blanca As intriguing as that was the story Morde said his Native guides told him really grabbed people's attention He reported the city supposedly once housed a temple with a staircase leading to a stone statue of a monkey god US newspapers jumped on this story calling the discovery Left This drawing by Virgil Finlay titled Lost City of the Monkey God illustrated the story of Theodore Morde's amazing discovery when it was first reported in the American Weekly newspaper supplement on September 22 1940 Below Theodore Morde May 18 1911 June 26 1954 was an explorer US Army spy reporter radio announcer and television news producer the City of the Monkey God Morde told no one how to find this city but vowed to return in 1941 to claim its treasures
But things did not go as planned World War II 1939-1945 was underway and instead of returning to Honduras the following year Morde went to Europe serving as a spy for the US Army Even after the war Morde never went back to La Mosquitia What happened In 2016 author Douglas Preston read Morde's expedition journals and he found that Morde's stories about finding the Lost City were false The journal entries showed that Morde spent much of his time in Honduras illegally searching for gold To cover this up he and a partner dug up or 7 purchased artifacts from local people at the end of the expedition It would be many years before Morde's sighting of a lost city that supposedly held the possibility of treasure in La Mosquitia was discovered to be fake And in that time more hopeful searchers made expeditions to look for it including ones in 1953 1960 1976 and 1985. There were several more failed expeditions in the 1990s including a 1994 exploration by US documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins Anyone on an expedition in search of the Lost City in La Mosquitia quickly learned it wasn't an easy walk in the woods
