Underneath the Honduran rain forests' dense canopy of trees, a team of researchers think they may have found the ruins of la Ciudad Blanca - the White City --- a legendary city of gold sought by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes.
In a 1526 letter to Spanish Emperor Charles V, Cortes described an area in the interior of Honduras with riches far greater than those of Mexico.
In 1839, according to a report by Nature World News, American diplomat and aspiring archaeologist John Lloyd Sturges went out in search of ruins in western Honduras and found the Mayan city of Copan, which he bought from a local landowner for fifty dollars.
Stephens then continued to explore other ruins in Central America and eventually published accounts of his discoveries in a best-selling coffee table book; but, he never found the White City..
Since Stephens' adventures, scholars have generally avoided the dense, dangerous jungles east and south of Copan, considering the people who lived there to be "primitive."
Today, after about 500-years-worth of tales about it have been told, scientists may finally have found the lost White City.
An exploration team that included researchers from the University of Houston, along with documentary filmmaker Steven Elkins and project underwriter Bill Benenson, scanned the forest with laser-based equipment aboard a slow, low-altitude aircraft. They eventually identified what appear to be remnants of long-forgotten civilization, complete with canals, ceremonial sites and terraced agriculture.
The scanning process, according to an explanation in The New Yorker, employed an imaging technique known as light-detection-and-ranging, which bombards the terrain of an area being studied with billions of laser pulses to gain an image of what lies beneath the leafy canopy.
It ended up taking the researchers months to map the hundreds of potential ruins at several sites in the target area, and it's still not known if what they found is, in fact, the White City.
That confirmation may come later this year, when the researchers plan to explore the structures on the ground.
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