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A Team of American and Honduran Archaeologists Claims to Have Discovered the Legendary “White City” Filled with Lost Gold of the Monkey God in Central America

A team of American and Honduran archaeologists has announced the discovery of the legendary “White City,” said to be filled with lost gold belonging to the Monkey God. The revelation has sent shockwaves through the global archaeological community.

New Discovery of the “White City of Gold” in Central America

The legendary “White City” was a wasteland filled with gold and was a mysterious but great civilization not built by the Aztecs and Mayans. (Illustration: Landmark Media)

The “White City,” also known as La Ciudad Blanca, is rumored to be drenched in gold and built by a mysterious ancient civilization, believed to be just as magnificent as the Aztecs or Maya.

The first person to claim discovery of the White City was American explorer Theodore Morde. On July 12, 1940, Morde returned from an expedition deep into the darkest jungles of Central America with a gripping story about what he had found.

Morde — a real-life Indiana Jones who would later become a wartime spy for the U.S. — had been hired by the founder of the Museum of the American Indian in New York to search for the legendary city. Legends had long claimed it was filled with gold and built by a civilization as great as the Maya or Aztecs.

Explorers had searched for La Ciudad Blanca for centuries, ever since Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés heard tales of a wealthy city while occupying Central America in the early 16th century. But the city remained hidden for hundreds of years—until Morde insisted he had found it in the dense, unforgiving Mosquitia rainforest, an area of over 82,879.6 km² across Honduras and Nicaragua.

According to Morde, he and his companion Lawrence Brown, armed with just a revolver and machete, spent four months hacking their way through nearly impenetrable jungle, swamps, rivers, and mountains before reaching a secluded valley containing ruins of a city with white stone walls.

Local Indigenous tribes told Morde that a long-lost civilization, contemporary with the ancient Maya, once worshipped a strange Monkey God. A massive statue of the Monkey God was said to remain buried beneath centuries of vegetation.

The Legend of the Monkey God

This mysterious people allegedly carried out blood sacrifices to their Monkey God—and then consumed the victims in ritualistic acts of cannibalism. Morde claimed that during his brief stay, he even witnessed a disturbing ritual where locals executed and ate monkeys at the ruins of the White City.

Another legend said the Monkey God had many offspring—creating a race of half-human, half-monkey beings known as “the hairy ones.” Locals believed monkeys from deep within the jungle once abducted village maidens to bear these hybrid children, and that the city was protected by ancient curses.

To support his claims, the 29-year-old Morde—who had already circled the globe five times—returned to the U.S. with thousands of artifacts, including carved stone tools and tiny monkey-faced masks. But he never revealed the city’s exact location, fearing it would be looted before he could return.

Tragically, Morde never returned. He died mysteriously in 1954, taking the secret of the White City’s location to his grave. Some believe he fell victim to the curse the natives warned about—a punishment for disturbing the forbidden city’s peace.

Generations of explorers ventured into the jungle in search of the city but failed. Some experts dismissed Morde’s story as a self-serving hoax.

But now, those skeptics may have to rethink everything.

A team of American and Honduran archaeologists has returned from La Mosquitia claiming to have found what may be the very city Morde described—nestled in a crater-shaped rainforest valley surrounded by steep mountains.

According to National Geographic, which accompanied the expedition, archaeologists surveyed and mapped out vast plazas, fortifications, mounds, and a pyramid made of earth, belonging to a highly developed civilization that flourished 1,000 years ago and then vanished.

The team also discovered a trove of stone artifacts, untouched since the city was abandoned.

Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist from Colorado State University and member of the team, believes the carved objects found at the base of the pyramid may have been ritual offerings to the Monkey God. Fisher and his colleagues first spotted the ruins nearly three years earlier during an aerial survey using high-tech laser scanning (LiDAR) that could see through the dense forest canopy.

The results revealed the ruins stretched more than 1.6 km along a river winding through the valley. Because the site lies on a major drug trafficking route, the team traveled there by helicopter, accompanied by Honduran special forces and former British SAS members.

Wild animals, seemingly unaccustomed to human presence, wandered freely through the team’s camp.

Even without excavation, researchers found 52 artifacts protruding from the ground, including ceremonial stone seats and finely carved vessels adorned with images of snakes, vultures, and other animals.

The most striking object was a fearsome fanged stone head — part human, part beast. Fisher believes it doesn’t represent a werewolf but a “jaguar-man,” a shaman depicted mid-transformation.

Scientists say the ancient civilization that built the city remains so little known that it doesn’t yet have a formal name, although Morde once referred to them as the Chorotegans.