ciudad blanca

Honduras is a rich country with many tropical places. After Hurricane Mitch, many legends and mysteries had been unsolved. La Ciudad Blanca or the Lost White City of Gold is one of those mysteries.

I believe
The Lost White City is the best known legend in Honduras.

Controversies
Scientists officially found evidence of what could be the legendary "White City" through satellite scanners.
The first reference to the "White City" is attributed to Hernán Cortés (1485-1547). In 1526, he wrote a letter to Carlos V. It refers to a mysterious city that might have more wealth than Mexico. The second reference appears in 1544, when Cristobal de Pedraza (1485-1553), bishop of the Diocese of Trujillo, writes a letter to the king of Spain in which he mentions a mysterious city in the Central American jungle. The third mention of the "White City" was made by the American explorer, Theodore Morde, in 1940, after a five-month expedition by the Honduran jungle.
We don't know if the stories of Hernán Cortés, Cristobal de Pedraza and Morde mentioned above, refer to the same city. In any case, the three stories relate to the same area of the Honduran jungle.

What Surprised Me?
The "White City" is a legend of Spanish chronicles, accounts of explorers and oral traditions.
Many explorers have gone in search of the White City of Gold.
One year after scientists found this city, they found another city in the same area.

Facts

• Hernan Cortes was the first who made reference to it in 1526.
• It is an area populated by trees; trees are 70 meters.
• No one has found gold. 
• It has never been excavaded
• It has played a central  role in Central American mythology.

On June 1, 2013,
U.S. scientists detected, using satellite technology, the existence of a new pre-Columbian city buried under dense unexplored jungles in Honduras. Through a new satellite technology similar to a scanner that lets you see the ground without the jungle, experts at Colorado State University (western USA) discovered two adjacent cities of the departments of Colón and Gracias a Dios, east country.

One of the two cities, now called Ciudad Blanca 1, had been detected a year ago, but in recent days the scientists identified the ruins of a neighboring city.

Together, the two would triple the size of Copan Ruins, the most important legacy of the Mayans known in Honduras.

Helkins Steve, one of the American scientists involved in the detection of these new sites, explained that the archaeological findings open the possibility of scientific investigations which would be "the discovery of the century" in this Central American country.

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