A group of American and Honduran archaeologists has claimed to have discovered the legendary “White City,” said to be filled with the lost gold of the Monkey God in Central America. News of this discovery immediately stirred excitement among archaeologists around the world.
The first person ever to claim the discovery of “La Ciudad Blanca”—the White City—was American explorer Theodore Morde. It was on July 12, 1940, when Morde returned from a journey into the darkest jungles of Central America with a fascinating tale of what he had found there.
Morde, a real-life Indiana Jones who later became a wartime spy for the United States, had been hired by the founder of the prestigious Museum of the American Indian in New York to search for the legendary “White City.” The city was long rumored to be overflowing with gold and built by a mysterious civilization said to be as great as the Aztecs or the Maya.
Explorers had been chasing La Ciudad Blanca for centuries, ever since Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés invaded Central America in the early 16th century and heard tales of its wealth. However, the legendary city remained hidden for hundreds of years, until Morde insisted he had found it in the Mosquitia rainforest—a harsh, untamed region spanning over 82,879.6 square kilometers across Honduras and Nicaragua.
Morde described how he and his companion, Lawrence Brown, equipped with only a pistol and a machete, spent four months hacking their way through “nearly impenetrable” jungle, swamps, rivers, and mountains before reaching a hidden valley containing the ruins of a walled city built from white stone.
The local Indigenous people told him that an ancient tribe, contemporaneous with the Maya but long vanished, once worshipped a strange monkey god. A massive statue of this monkey god, they said, still lay buried beneath centuries of overgrown vegetation.
The mysterious tribe was said to have performed bloody human sacrifices to their monkey god, followed by ritualistic cannibalism of the victims. Morde claimed that during his brief expedition, he personally witnessed a terrifying ceremony in which locals executed and ate monkeys at the site of the “White City.”
There was also another legend: that the Monkey God had produced many offspring—a race of half-human, half-monkey beings nicknamed the “Hairy People.” Locals believed that monkeys from the deep jungle had long ago abducted virgins from their villages to create hybrids, and that the “White City” was protected by powerful curses.
To support his astonishing claims, Morde—then just 29 years old and already a man who had circled the globe five times—brought back thousands of artifacts to the U.S., including stone tools and intricately carved masks depicting miniature monkey faces. However, he never revealed the exact location of the ruined city, fearing it would be looted before he could return.
Yet Morde never did return. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1954, taking the secret of the “White City’s” location to his grave. Some fanatics believe Morde’s death was a fulfillment of the native warning—that disturbing the peace of the forbidden city would invoke a deadly curse.
Generations of explorers later ventured deep into the jungle in search of the city, all in vain. Experts even dismissed Morde’s discovery as a hoax, a self-serving myth to bolster his reputation.
However, skeptics may now have to reconsider. A joint team of American and Honduran archaeologists recently returned from La Mosquitia claiming to have found what could be the ruins of the Monkey God’s city, just as Morde described. The site lies in a rainforest valley shaped like a volcanic crater, surrounded by steep mountains.
According to National Geographic, which accompanied the expedition, the archaeological team surveyed and mapped “broad plazas, fortifications, earthworks, and a pyramid made of clay,” all believed to belong to a once-flourishing civilization that disappeared over a thousand years ago.
The team also uncovered an impressive collection of stone carvings—perfectly preserved since the city was abandoned.
Archaeologist Christopher Fisher of Colorado State University, a member of the research team, believes that the stone carvings found at the base of the pyramid may have been offerings to the Monkey God. Fisher and his colleagues first detected signs of the site nearly three years earlier during an aerial survey using high-tech laser scanning equipment capable of penetrating the forest canopy with light beams.
The results revealed that the ruins stretched over 1.6 kilometers along a river winding through the valley. This remote and rugged area lies along a major cocaine smuggling route, so the scientists had to be flown in by helicopter under the protection of the Honduran special forces and former British special air service (SAS) operatives.
Wild animals frequently wandered through the research team’s camp, clearly having never encountered humans before.
Without even needing to excavate, the experts found 52 artifacts protruding from the ground, including ceremonial stone seats and intricately carved vessels adorned with images of snakes, vultures, and other animals.
The most fascinating item among the relics was a stone head with fierce fangs, appearing half-human, half-beast. Fisher believes it does not represent a “werewolf,” but rather a “were-jaguar,” symbolizing a shaman in a state of transformation.
According to the researchers, the ancient culture that built this city remains so little known that it still lacks a proper name, though Morde had once referred to its people as the Chorotegans.
