Patagonia’s Mysterious Lost City of the Caesars

I met Jill Yesko at Killer Nashville earlier this year.  We struck up a conversation about South American history, and she told me the story below.  As soon as I heard it, I knew I wanted to share it on MIE.  So, allow me to introduce Jill.  She is the author of “Murder in the Dog Park” and the just-launched “Dog Spelled Backwards.” She was a doctoral candidate in cultural geography at Syracuse University, and you can find her at  www.murderinthedogpark.com.

Annamaria - Monday

The maps were blank, the directions lousy, but explorers for 300 years knew that the fabled Lost City of the Caesars was just beyond the next ridge...

Paul Theroux, author of The Old Patagonian Express, was right when he wrote, “nowhere is a place.”

Patagonia is a place—and a big one at that. While programs like Google Earth have put maps at our fingertips, seventeenth-century cartographers found the interior of Patagonia such a cipher that they labeled it “Incognita.” For centuries, Patagonia’s geographic isolation at the bottom of the Americas helped foster an image of a tabula rasa onto which explorers and writers projected their hopes and fears.

Spanish explorers seized on Patagonia as a location for El Dorado, the golden treasure trove they took to be just around the bend anywhere they went in the Americas. Local Indians were only too happy to rid themselves of bothersome Spanish invaders by directing them to supposed lands of gold far into the uttermost reaches of Patagonia.

In 1515, the Spaniard explorer Juan de Solis and his men were attacked by Indians while exploring the area near present day Buenos Aires. Rumor spread that the survivors of de Solis’ party trekked inland toward Patagonia. There they stumbled upon a fantastic city inhabited by a race of white men.

In 1528, Francisco Cesar claimed to find a city of immense wealth in the Andes that he called the Ciudad de los Cesares–the City of Caesars.

Hearing the same rumor, Jesuit missionaries in Patagonia, believing the so-called City of Caesars to be an island of salvation in a “sea of barbarism,” joined the search for what they thought to be wayward Christians. In 1766, the Jesuit Father José García Alsue explored the area now part of Chile searching for the City of the Caesars.

Keeping the legend of the Lost City of Caesars alive was beneficial to the Spanish and British crowns. Both monarchies used the myth of city of lost “whites” in a game of colonial one upmanship. Under the premise of ferreting out the Lost City, Spanish and British monarchs established outposts in the most remote corners of Patagonia to keep track of rival colonists. 

By the close of the Age of Exploration, scientists exploring Patagonia showed little enthusiasm for accounts of fanciful kingdoms and lost tribes. Naturalists like Charles Darwin trained their attentions on Patagonia’s flora and fauna rather than legends. Writing in his Beagle diary, Darwin recounted the sublime beauty of the Patagonian landscape while ranting against the “cannibal” Fuegan Indians he encountered.

Too cynical to believe in lost kingdoms of white gods, Darwin wrote that Patagonia is “el fin de Cristiandad,”—the end of the line for any hope of discovering reclusive Christian souls.

More than two centuries after Darwin, a group called the Delphos Foundation reportedly discovered a fortress in Argentina’s Rio Negro province that they claim is part of one of the many fortresses of the City of the Caesars. They believe the fortress was built by the Knights Templars to protect the Holy Grail which was smuggled to the Americas.

In Patagonia, it seems, old legends die hard.

The Lost Cities of the Amazon

Remember the tales of El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold, the South American Shangri-La?

If only we could trace the legend back, and find out who started it.

That individual, whoever he was (I’m assuming it was a he) has a lot to answer for.

Five hundred years ago,  Francisco de Orellana, the Spanish explorer, travelled the length of the Amazon River searching for it.

He didn’t find it.

But he did survive.

And, in that, he was lucky.

Because many hundreds, perhaps thousands, – didn’t.

The legend arose in the sixteenth century and persisted, in one form or another, right down to the third decade of the twentieth.

The conquistadors of the mid-1500’s exchanged tales of causeways and grand roads, of great cities, of thousands upon thousands of Indians, and of heaps and heaps of gold.

And I have written earlier in this space about Percy Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/search/label/Percy%20Fawcett

That was in 1925.

Fawcett’s El Dorado was a place he called The Lost City of Z.

He lost his life trying to prove it existed.

Back in those days, mankind was still engaged with one of the most monumental tasks in history, mapping the world. 


And vast swaths of it remained unexplored, forming a fertile environment in which rumor and legend could grow.

But, as time went by, and the men (and women) who followed Fawcett found nothing but sweltering jungle, poisonous snakes, primitive tribesmen and disease-carrying bugs, the idea of a great civilization hidden in the heart of the Amazon began to fall into disrepute.

Scientists declared that the region could never have supported an advanced civilization.  They began to look upon the Amazon Rainforest as nothing more than a wasteland, a sort of verdant Sahara. The existence of El Dorado came to be regarded as just about as likely as the existence of Atlantis.

But then, after about a hundred years of believing the maps were complete, and a hundred years of archeologists telling us there was nothing there, guess what?

Turns out, there was.

Okay, okay, it may be a bit fanciful to equate the recent discoveries in Kuhikugu with El Dorado.


But one thing is for certain: they’ve shot the hell out of a lot of theories.

Michael Heckenberger is a professor of historical anthropology at the University of Florida.

In recent years he’s been excavating there.

And has hypothesized that Kuhikugu might possibly have given rise to the legend? 


Could be.

But, in reality, there wasn’t one settlement in the heart of the Amazon; there were more than twenty.

They covered an area of almost 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles ) and had a total population in the neighborhood of 50,000.

The settlements were built around large, circular plazas and surrounded by enormous ditches.

They were linked by a number of roads, and those roads were constructed in a carefully-organized, gridlike pattern.

According to carbon dating, the civilization flourished from about 200 AD up until around 1600 when diseases brought into the new world by Europeans, virtually wiped them out.

They lived, according to Heckenberger, in an area more akin to a large park than an untouched rainforest.

They built in wood, rather than stone.

They bridged a number of great rivers.

They built moats in wetland areas.

And they cultivated vast tracts of land.

Okay, we’re not talking about the Roman Empire here, or even the Mayan.

But, considering the way most of the world lived back then, it’s still  pretty impressive.

And, until the modern age, the achievements of the people who once lived in Kuhikugu have remained unsurpassed in the region.

Leighton - Monday