Ciudad Perdida (The Lost City)

Ciudad Perdida ("Lost City"), known to the Indigenous Kogi, Wiwa, Kankuamo, and Arhuaco peoples of Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as Teyuna, was founded by the Tairona civilisation around 800 CE — roughly 650 years before Machu Picchu — and grew into one of the largest urban centres in pre-Columbian Colombia, with more than 200 stone terraces carved into the steep mountainside, connected by stone stairways and paved paths, accommodating an estimated population in the low thousands at its height. The city was gradually abandoned following the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, when disease and conflict devastated the Tairona population, and the jungle reclaimed the site over the following centuries.

Ciudad Perdida was rediscovered in 1972 by a group of local treasure hunters known as "guaqueros," who looted gold figurines and ceramics from the tombs and sold them on the black market — a discovery that came to the attention of archaeologists only after some of the looted artefacts surfaced in the antiquities trade, prompting Colombian authorities to begin formal excavations in 1976. The site remains sacred to the descendant Indigenous communities of the Sierra Nevada, who refer to it as the symbolic "heart of the world" and have, at various points, restricted or closed access to outsiders — including a temporary closure following the kidnapping of foreign tourists by guerrilla forces in 2003 — reflecting an ongoing tension between the site's status as both an active spiritual centre and an archaeological tourist destination reachable only by a strenuous multi-day trek through the jungle.