Image: Joerg Steber (Shutterstock)
For hundreds of years, the indigenous people of Honduras have told tales of the White City, or the City of the Monkey God, a place of great wealth in the densely jungled Mosquitia region. They say the White City cannot be entered, and people can’t take anything from it, and if you tell where it is, you will be punished. These warnings and the deadly landscape did not stop conquistadors and colonizers alike from searching. Periodically, someone says they found it, but no one can agree on where it is.
These days, many archeologists maintain that the pre-Columbian jungles of the Mosquitia region were carefully tended by an organized indigenous society that left little trace of itself, and that the “lost cities” of the jungle are basically Western romanticism. I can only hope that once we’ve fully deforested Honduras, the mystery will be solved for good.
