El Dorado’s cousin: the Lost City of Z

A famous 1925 disappearance, hunting cities LIDAR later found

Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British surveyor and mapmaker who held the Royal Geographical Society's Gold Medal and served on the Western Front, came to believe that a complex civilisation had once existed in the jungle of Mato Grosso in Brazil, and that isolated ruins of it might survive. He called its city Z. Part of his case rested on Manuscript 512 in the National Library of Brazil, a document of dubious truth attributed to the bandeirante João da Silva Guimarães, which describes ruins found in 1753 with arches, a statue and a temple bearing hieroglyphs. Fawcett was embarrassed by the El Dorado story, which he called an exaggerated romance, and insisted his own theory was grounded in science.

The First World War stopped his first attempt, and in 1920 fever turned him back. In 1925 he set out again, aged fifty-seven, with his son Jack, who was 21, and Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimell, while newspapers around the globe followed the trip. The three never came back. Fawcett had kept his route secret, partly so that no rival would find Z first and partly because he believed any rescue would only cost more lives. The coordinates Fawcett gave in papers his son Brian published in 1953, Dead Horse Camp at 11° 43' south and 54° 35' west, turned out to be false, given to throw off would-be seekers. He was declared missing in 1927, and a wave of expeditions went after him.

Fawcett's travels fed fiction even before he vanished: Arthur Conan Doyle reportedly drew on them for his 1912 novel The Lost World. Much later, David Grann's 2005 New Yorker article became his book The Lost City of Z in 2009 and James Gray's film in 2016.

Fawcett may have heard from indigenous people about Kuhikugu, near the headwaters of the Xingu, where the anthropologist Michael Heckenberger works with the Kuikuro Nation on networks of linked villages. In 2022, lidar flown from a helicopter some 650 feet up over Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon revealed urban centres of the Casarabe culture, from about 500 to 1400 CE, with platform mounds and pyramids, raised causeways joining outlying settlements, and reservoirs and canals. Heckenberger called it the clearest case of a fully urbanised Amazonian landscape. None of it matches Manuscript 512, but the forest that Europeans imagined untouched was, in places, heavily populated for centuries.