Ciudad Blanca (The White City)

Stories of a "White City" or "City of the Monkey God" hidden somewhere in the dense rainforest of Honduras's Mosquitia region date back to Spanish colonial accounts from the 16th century, and were repeated by 20th-century explorers, journalists, and treasure hunters — most famously the explorer Theodore Morde, who claimed in 1940 to have located the city and recovered artefacts from it (including a stone idol he called the "Monkey God") but died before revealing its location, fuelling decades of further speculation and several inconclusive expeditions.

In 2012, an aerial LIDAR (light detection and ranging) survey commissioned by documentary filmmakers and conducted over remote valleys of the Mosquitia identified extensive man-made earthworks — plazas, mounds, and a possible pyramid — beneath the forest canopy in a valley some researchers have nicknamed "Ciudad del Jaguar" (City of the Jaguar). Ground expeditions in 2015, led by archaeologists including Christopher Fisher, recovered hundreds of artefacts, including stone effigies of figures emerging from caches that had apparently been deliberately buried and left undisturbed for centuries. While archaeologists have been careful to avoid endorsing the "White City" legend directly — the ruins belong to a still-unidentified pre-Columbian culture distinct from the Maya, and there is no single "lost city" matching the legend's description — the discoveries confirmed that the region does contain substantial, previously undocumented archaeological remains, and local Indigenous oral traditions reportedly held that the area was a place to be avoided, associated with sickness befalling those who disturbed it — a belief some expedition members noted with unease after several team members contracted leishmaniasis, a serious parasitic disease transmitted by sand flies common in the area, during the 2015 expedition.