Ciudad Blanca or The Lost City of the Monkey God.

 “There’s supposedly a lost city… which the Indians call the City of the Monkey God. They are afraid to go near it for they believe that any one who approaches it will, within the month, be killed by the bite of a poisonous snake.”(Raphael 1934).

A second expedition was made to look for this lost city, but it wan’t found.  It’s around this time that the “White City” and the “City of the Monkey God” apper to have been blended together. Other than both being ‘lost’ cities, there don’t apper to be a good reason for this, but this blending became permanent fairly quickly.

In 1940, Heye hired another adventurer, Theodore Morde to go on a third expedition, specifically looking for the lost city. Morde took with him Laurence C. Brown, and after about 4 months in the jungles, the two returned with artifacts, and the claim that they had found the Lost City of the Monkey King (Reading 1940). The men also claimed that they had found evidence of gold, silver, and platinum and oil (Reading 1940), but it’s not clear if they were saying that the resources were found associated with the lost city, or were just spotted as the men explored.

Morde wrote vividly of the lost city he had found:

Morde later described travelling for miles up rivers, through swamps and jungle, and over mountains before reaching the ruins. “The City of the Monkey God was walled,” Morde wrote. “We found some of those walls upon which the green magic of the jungle had worked small damages and which had resisted the flood of vegetation. We traced one wall until it vanished under mounds that have all the evidence of once being great buildings.” The jungle was too thick to see much else, but his Indian guides told him that, according to legend, it hid a great temple with a vast staircase leading to “a high stone dais on which was the statue of the Monkey God himself. Before it was the place of sacrifice.” He wrote, “Towering mountains formed the backdrop of the scene. Nearby, a rushing cataract, beautiful as a robe of shimmering jewels, cascaded into the green valley of the ruins.” (Preston 2013).

At the time, the two men refused to give the location of the lost city since they were planning on returning to do a more thorough excavation (Reading 1940). Sadly this would never happen as Morde committed suicide in 1954 (Preston 2013).

Thus we jump forward to 2013 and bring Chris Begley into the story.  Begley is a veteran of archaeology in Honduras. He’s spent years exploring and documenting ruins in the area. In 2013 he took novelist Christopher Stewart into the Honduran jungle to retrace Morde’s steps and relocate the fabled City of the Monkey King. We interview Begley about this on the podcast. Predictably, they didn’t find the lost city, but really, how would they know if they did?

Jump forward again to 2015, when an archaeological team lead by Christopher Fisher went into the Honduran jungle to record extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid found by a LiDAR survey done in 2012 (Preston 2015). The LiDAR survey was funded by two documentary film makers,  Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson (Preston 2015). Fisher’s team found 52 artifacts, including large stone statues, stone seats, and other ceremonial objects, apparently buried at the foot of the earthen pyramid (Preston 2015). The media surrounding both the LiDAR survey and the archaeological survey constantly threw round the names of White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God, but other than getting eyes on their articles, there’s nothing to support that either place was found.

This is the critical flaw in the story of  Ciudad Blanca, there is no way to know if it is ever found.  By definition a Lost City is lost. So if someone really did know where it was, and then shared that, then it’s not really lost. Then there is the lack of information about said city. There’s no descriptors of the city other than ‘white walls’, so if a location is suspected of being Ciudad Blanca, there would be no way of telling.

Preston leaves us with a quote from Begley that sums up the search of all such ‘lost cities’:

after a brutal, weeks-long trek, they arrive at a large ruin, which may or may not be Morde’s City of the Monkey God. Begley announces dryly that, by definition, the ruin cannot be the White City, “because the White City must always be lost.”  (Preston 2013).

Resources:

Conzemius, Eduard
1927     “Los Indios Payas de Honduras, Estudio geografico, historico, etnografico y linguistico” in Journal de la Societé des Americanistes. Tome 19,p. 302. Retrieved 8/1/2016.

Colavito, Jason
2013    On the Development of the Ciudad Blanca Myth. http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/on-the-development-of-the-ciudad-blanca-myth. Retrieved 8/1/2016.

Raphael, Leona
1934     “Explorer Seeks Fabled Lost City; Spurns Weaker Sex Companionship”. Calgary Daily Herald. p. 34. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=JxpkAAAAIBAJ&sjid=G3sNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1617,5791667 Retrieved 8/1/2016.

Preston, Douglas
2013    “The El Dorado Machine”. The New Yorker: 34–40. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/06/130506fa_fact_preston  Retrieved 8/1/2016.

2015    Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest. National Geographic http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150302-honduras-lost-city-monkey-god-maya-ancient-archaeology/ Retrieved 8/1/2016.