The Lost City of Z

The account

Percy Fawcett was the last of the great Victorian explorers, a British surveyor who had hacked through more of the Amazon than almost any European alive, and he came back from it convinced of something his peers thought was madness: that somewhere in the unmapped green of the Mato Grosso lay the ruins of a great and ancient city, stone streets and towers swallowed by jungle, a lost civilization in a place everyone insisted could never have held one. He called it Z.

In April 1925, financed by newspapers and obsessed past reason, he walked into the jungle to find it, taking his grown son Jack and Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimell. From a place he called Dead Horse Camp he sent out one last letter, telling his wife not to fear failure. That was the end of May, 1925. Nothing certain has ever been heard of the three of them again. Over the next decades the legend pulled others in after him, and many of those would-be rescuers died in the same green maze.

For most of a century the whole thing was filed under romantic delusion, a doomed man chasing a city that never was.

Except he was right. In the last twenty years archaeologists working the upper Xingu, and satellite lidar peeling back the canopy, have found exactly what Fawcett swore was there: huge ancient settlements, ringed towns linked by causeways, a landscape engineered by a vanished people, places like Kuhikugu hidden under the trees. So the loop is doubled and aching. The civilization Fawcett died insisting was real has been proven real, and he never got to know it. And Fawcett himself, his son, and the precise city he was walking toward are all still out there, lost in the one part of the world still big enough and dense enough to keep a secret a hundred years.

Known intelligence

• British explorer Percy Fawcett believed a complex ancient civilization had built a city, which he called Z, in the Mato Grosso jungle of Brazil.
• In April 1925 he set out to find it with his son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell; they were last seen at "Dead Horse Camp" on 29 May 1925.
• The three vanished without trace; over the following decades many would-be rescuers also died searching for them.
• Modern lidar and digs have revealed real large ancient settlements in the region, such as Kuhikugu, vindicating Fawcett's core idea.

Theories of the hunt

• Fawcett and his companions died of starvation, illness, or at the hands of an Amazon tribe.
• The "city" was a real network of ancient towns, now confirmed by archaeology, that Fawcett sensed but never reached.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The city Fawcett sought is now identified with the real ancient settlements of the upper Xingu, the Kuhikugu network confirmed by Michael Heckenberger's fieldwork and by lidar; that is where the archaeology leads.
• Fawcett's own fate is a separate cold case: his last position was Dead Horse Camp, and the strongest accounts have him dying among or at the hands of an Amazon people; a few of his effects later surfaced.
• His son Brian published the logs as Exploration Fawcett; those notebooks and his Royal Geographical Society records are the documentary trail.
• The region is Indigenous land in the Xingu park; access needs permission and respect, and it is not a treasure dig.

The trail, in order

• 1920s: Fawcett develops his theory of a lost Amazon civilization.
• April 1925: he sets out with his son Jack and Raleigh Rimell.
• 29 May 1925: the party is last heard from at Dead Horse Camp.
• 2000s-present: lidar confirms large ancient settlements in the region.

Sources and the record

• Lost City of Z (Wikipedia)
• The man who died searching for the Lost City of Z (National Geographic)