Archaeologists believe they have uncovered the location of the fabled lost White City of the Monkey God in Honduras.
The site had been lost to civilisation for 500 years until the ruins were identified in the Mosquitia jungle in May 2012. In an aerial survey using remote sensing Light Detection and Ranging, or LIDAR, archaeologists mapped a series of earthworks and mounds that belonged to a once thriving culture a thousand years ago, which ha since vanished.
The discovery has now been confirmed on the ground by an expedition by archaeologists, aided by former SAS soldiers.
The area is so remote and deep within the jungle that the animals living there do not appears to have seen humans before, according to National Geographic.
The civilisation has been so scarcely studied that archaeologists are yet to give it a name, and the unlooted site provides a rare insight into a lost world.
Adventurers have searched for the lost city for a hundred years, and told tales of structures glimpsed above the jungle canopy, while local stories described a “white house” in the jungle where indigenous people took refuge from the Conquistadors.
Explorer Theodore Morde mounted an expedition to find the lost city in 1940 and returned from the Mosquitia jungle with thousands of artefacts claiming to have found the site. He told stories of a buried giant statue of monkey head, but refused to divulge the location of the site out of fear that it may be looted.
The archaeologists of the recent expedition have followed Morde’s lead and also not disclosed the location of the site.
