Sought by Hernán Cortés and his men, the fabled and elusive Ciudad Blanca (White City) might have been finally found. At least that’s what researchers are hoping for.
Archeologists and filmmakers have been scanning the Honduran jungles, bouncing radar through the thick foliage of about 32,000 square miles of green, fertile land to come out convinced that something, ancient and man-made lays underneath the jungle.

From Wikipedia:

In 1526, conquistador Hernán Cortés wrote a letter to Spanish Emperor Charles V detailing a city filled with gold that lay at an unknown location in what is now the Mosquitia region of Honduras – a 32,000 square mile chunk of land that remains virtually unexplored. Cortés and other conquistadors searched for the city throughout the 1500s, but never found it, and the region remained unconquered by Europeans. Since then, a mix of treasure hunters and scientific expeditions have yielded findings that have fueled the legend of the lost city.

Possibly the first archeological expedition was performed in 1933 when archeologist William Duncan Strong explored the region for the Smithsonian Institution. The expedition included areas in the Bay Island Department of Honduras as well as areas in the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua. In his field journal he recorded the existence of archeological mounds, among many the Wankibila or Guanquivila mounds on the banks of the Rio Patuca and the Floresta Mounds on the banks of the Rio Conquirre.

In the same year, the first complete map of Honduras was published by Honduran Professor Jesus Aguilar Paz. Aguilar Paz started his cartographic expedition in 1915. In his map, he registered several archeological ruins in the Mosquitia region.

In 1940, American adventurer Theodore Morde claimed to have found a “lost city of the monkey god” in the region, where native people worshiped large monkey statues. Morde was killed in a car crash before he could secure funding to explore the area more fully.

A 1976 expedition by David Zink and Edwin Shook was filmed by a TV crew. The crew traveled by airplane and helicopter to the Mosquitia were they located ancient mounds, over which a current inhabitant of the area had built his dwelling. They also unearthed several stone monoliths.

Since the 1980s, several archeologists such as George Hasemann, Gloria Lara Pinto, and Chris Begley have explored the area and have documented hundreds of sites, including the site know as Crucitas del Rio Aner, which is located in the periphery of the Mosquitia Jungle, and it is the largest site explored and documented to date.

Source: Live Science

Ciudad Blanca, or “The White City,” has been a legend since the days of the conquistadors, who believed the Mosquitia rain forests hid a metropolis full of gold and searched for it in the 1500s. Throughout the 1900s, archaeologists documented mounds and other signs of ancient civilization in the Mosquitias region, but the shining golden city of legend has yet to make an appearance.

Whether or not the lidar-weilding archaeologists have discovered the same city the conquistadors were looking for is up for debate, but the images suggest some signs of an ancient lost civilization.

“We use lidar to pinpoint where human structures are by looking for linear shapes and rectangles,” Colorado State University research Stephen Leisz, who uses lidar in Mexico, said in a statement. “Nature doesn’t work in straight lines.”

The archaeologists plan to get their feet on the ground this year to investigate the mysterious features seen in the new images.