Ciudad Blanca in the Honduran Mosquitia

Honduras’ Lost City the Ciudad Blanca Inspires Adventurers to Discover it

By Wendy Griffin

I am amazed that when some people hear about a “lost” city in the Honduran Mosquitia rainforest, known as the “Ciudad Blanca” (The White City), they think, “I should go and look for it…” and within a relatively short time, they decide to dedicate significant amounts of time, energy, and money and suffer significant hardships to do so.

 When Ted Danger was hunting for gold in the Rio Platano area, and saw some of the archaeological pieces like those shown on the website www.roatanet.com/ciudadblanca  he was then inspired to spend years and significant sums of money documenting what was known about the area, its indigenous inhabitants, and  the search for the site. Danger, interviewing people in various countries  and throughout Honduras, made several trips into the Mosquitia himself to look for the Lost City.  His latest expedition is documented in the video “Discover the Rio Platano Biosphere: in Search of the Ciudad Blanca”. It was filmed by Discovery Channel cameraman Tony Barrado and recently edited into a four part series in English  (1 part in Spanish) on Youtube. This video also has an excellent history of how the Rio Platano Biosphere was started.

Canadian geographer Derek Parent was travelling between Mexico and Honduras studying the phenomena of protected areas encapsulating archaeological sites, when he arrived at Santa Rosa de Copan on the western side of Honduras. While there, he began to hear stories and oral traditions related to the lost Ciudad Blanca somewhere in the Mosquitia. He was then inspired to go into the remote Mosquitia on the far side of the country, several days travel away,  exploring, measuring and mapping ancient ruins covered by rainforest, staying with anyone who would give him shelter.   “Some very unusual people are hiding in the rainforest in the Honduran Mosquitia”, noted Derek Parent, who was interviewed for A & E TV (Arts & Entertainment) network’s Lost Cities episode on The Unexplained series, showcasing Ciudad Blanca. The task of mapping the Mosquitia, its archaeological sites and river and coastal transportation eventually took six years during which he spent over $100,000, before heading home to Canada.

 On Parent’s return from the Mosquitia, he spent still more years analyzing the journals of an earlier researcher investigating the Ciudad Blanca: Theodore Morde, working with Morde’s nephew David Morde, to try to decipher Morde’s  precise trajectory from old journals to the City of the Monkey Gods -- Morde’s name for the large ruin he found and which he thought might be the Ciudad Blanca. This collaboration went on for nearly ten years. Morde’s 1939 Ciudad de Mono Dios (City of the Monkey God) report in Spanish is in the IHAH library in Tegucigalpa. Parent  eventually deciphered Morde’s mysterious and complex carved and numbered stick as directions to, or, shape of a ruin find.  Parent actually went back to the Mosquitia on several occasions to complete his 6 year project mapping the entire Mosquitia and RAAN/RAAS regions of Honduras and Nicaragua.

Traveling via sea kayak along the Coast of the Mosquitia and up many of the rivers—Parent, in part, studied issues like transportation routes of the peoples who he thought were connected with the Ciudad Blanca and oral traditions thereof. Articles on the Ciudad Blanca and Theodore Morde are available on Wikipedia in English.

These expeditions led Parent to complete his extremely detailed series of thirty four  1:30 000 and 1:60 000 scale maps over a 6 year project time, covering the entire Honduras Department of Gracias a Dios, regions of Nicaragua, entitled: La Mosquitia & Environs. These maps, now on DVD, are at a scale and detail not ever publically available on this region in the past, showing in minutia features of every currently protected and proposed protected park and trail, including indigenous water routes throughout this vast little-travelled region, and 84 additional thematic map layers all overlaid on a high resolution digital terrain model, acquired from the SRTM space shuttle topography mission. Parent’s new map set have been used by developers of private nature parks in Nicaragua, as thematic maps in ornithological journal publications, as large park posters for expedition clients and as expedition planning tools on several cultural and geophysical forays into the region.

While on these trips he visited most of the archaeological sites connected by legend to the Ciudad Blanca and his book on his travels in the Mosquitia sold thousands and thousands of copies during a 14 state signing tour, he said. His website on a Walkabout in the Mosquitia was popular and was consulted by both academics like archaeologist John Hoopes and other people interested in the Mosquitia. This website is no longer up and the web archive site, known as the Way Back machine, does not have this site. Some librarians and historians are concerned about things that are only on the Internet are not being archived anywhere, and once their owner stops paying for the website, the content disappears.

Dangers Lurk for People thinking to visit the Ciudad Blanca area

By Wendy Griffin

Over the last year there has been considerable interest in the Honduran Spanish language press and among Honduran government officials about the Ciudad Blanca (White city), a ruin in the Honduran Mosquitia reportedly located within the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve.  Former Honduran President Lobo reportedly told his Council of Ministers that the finding of the Ciudad Blanca is one of the major scientific discoveries of the 21^st century.  El Heraldo, a Tegucigalpa paper, did a whole series on Ciudad Blanca and La Tribuna, also of Tegucigalpa, recently did an editorial on how it is necessary to do something about the Ciudad Blanca, reported Honduran anthropologist Dr. Lazaro Flores whose books Mitos y Leyendas de los Pech Los Guardianes de los Patatahua (Myths and legends of the Pech The Guardians of the Patatahua-our enemies) in 1989 and Dioses, Heroes y Hombres en el Universo Mítico Pech (Gods, Heros and Men in the Pech Mythical Universe)  in 1991 contained some of the first published Pech accounts of the Legend of the Ciudad Blanca. Apparantly dreams of dollars and thousands of eco-tourists are part of why the Hondurans are excited about the possibility of the Ciudad Blanca. Both El Heraldo and La Tribuna are available online.

 The Pech of Las Marias, located at the base of the Rio Platano report there are now two soldiers  assigned to protect the forest of the Rio Platano Biosphere.  This Reserve houses at least 50,000 inhabitants. (The Wikipedia article on the Biosphere says 2,000, but just the Garifunas in the Bioshere number over 5,000).   The Rio Platano Biosphere, originally a park designed to protect the Ciudad Blanca archaeological zone, is about the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, estimates writer Chris Stewart, author of a new book about searching for the Ciudad Blanca Jungleland, available on Amazon.com. Prior to 1992 there was no Honduran government presence in the area, which helps explain why UNAH ethnobiologist Paul House describes the area as a lawless area in the video Discover the Rio Platano Reserve in Search of  Ciudad Blanca filmed by Ted Danger and available on youtube in English or in Spanish. Search for Ciudad Blanca Honduras.

Chris Stewart, the author of the recently published book, “Jungleland” about his search for the Ciudad Blanca, and his guides (including US archaeologist Chris Begley) report running into bandits. Chris’s Ladino tour guides lost their lands due to bandits over running their village in the area.  The problem of Ladinos going into the area and cutting down mahogany while protecting loggers with machine guns or AK-47’s, or settling “a la fuerza” (by force) in Indian controlled areas has been reported by Miskitos, Pech and Garifunas in and near the Rio Platano Biosphere area. Trafficking in endangered species or hunting animals in danger of extinction are also frequently mentioned by adventurers such as Derek Parent and is shown in Ted Danger’s video on the Ciudad Blanca on YouTube.

I have heard reports in Trujillo of two Italians tourists who were murdered traveling by land in public transportation to the Rio Platano Biosphere. Chris Stewart reports seeing and hearing of actual dead people as he travels in the Mosquitia. If people are shooting and killing tourists who have video cameras in the center of Tegucigalpa or San Pedro, cities where there are a lot of police and witnesses, who is going to do anything about another dead person in the rainforest? Some Honduran bus companies have refused to travel through Olancho any more along the road that goes by the Muralla National Park where the quetzal birds are after the murder of a driver and the rape of a female tourist on a COTRAIBAL bus.

 I stopped writing tourist articles for Honduras This Week after family members of an American tourist killed on a public bus travelling through Olancho wrote and complained why were we encouraging people to come to Honduras to meet their death? Thousands of tourists a year get in and out of Honduras, even San Pedro Sula,  without dying, but the question of Honduran crime, known general as “delicuencia” or “la insecuridad”, which includes not just murder, but also kidnapping for as little as L1,000 ransom, robbery, carjacking, and rape definitely hurts the likelihood tourists will want to come to Honduras in general and the Ciudad Blanca area in particular. The presence of drug traffickers and illegal loggers with AK 47’s and drug airports in the area are also a deterant and the Miskito women who had formed a microbusiness for tourists in the area have abandoned it, so do not fooled by the glowing reports of ecotourism in the Wikipedia article.

 At the conclusion of Danger’s video there is a great interview with the Garifuna indigenous guide Roberto Marin of Plaplaya about the question of foreign aid for the Biosphere, that there is a lot of it,  but the Biosphere has not changed at all in spite of that, and in fact is getting worse. Although filmed in 2000, the Pech did not think the situation had improved any since that video was filmed. In fact, the deterioration around the Pech communities at Las Marias, caused by illegal logging, clearing for cattle, and people buying land for African palms, in the heart of the Rio Platano Biosphere, Honduras’s largest park and a UNESCO World Heritage site, has gotten markedly worse over the last 3 years, report the Pech of Las Marias.

The Garifunas of OFRANEH also denounce problems of drug trafficking in the “muncipio” or county of  Walamagu, Gracias a Dios where the Ciudad Blanca may be  located. The Rio Platano Biosphere where the Ciudad Blanca may be located includes areas included in the muncipios of Walamugu (Juan Francisco Bulnes) and Brus Laguna in Gracias a Dios (la Mosquitia), Iriona, Colon and Dulce Nombre de Culmi, Olancho.

The area of the Sico and Paulaya Rivers which are both gold bearing rivers in Iriona, Colon which run into the Rio Negro (Black River) border on the Ciudad Blanca area, which was described by Theodore Morde as between the Rio Paulaya and the Rio Platano. OFRANEH also denounces drug trafficking problems in Iriona, Colon and both Ladinos and Garifuna report drug traffickers using the highway between Trujillo and Tocoa and Iriona. Garifunas in Iriona report some of their land being taken over by drug traffickers. In Trujillo Garifunas report a drug related airstrip outside of Sangrelaya, a Garifuna community in Iriona only acessible by canoe or by air, which like the drug airport at Las Marias can be seen on the Honduran government’s official Model City or ZEDE website www.zede.gob.hn.

 The muncipio or county of Culmi, Olancho  is also  an area associated drug trafficking in addition to possibly being home to the Ciudad Blanca  with Ladinos who produce and distribute marijuana in Honduras, and according to the Pech many of the deaths among Ladinos in the Culmi area are associated with “la hoja” (the leaf), as they call the local marijauana trade. The Pech have also been murdered or attempted to be murdered in the Culmi, Olancho area for reasons of theft, like stealing liquidambar resin or stealing a motorcycle. Pech leaders have also been murdered for land disputes like teacher Blas Lopez, who was president of the Pech Federation (FETRIPH) at the time of his death.

There are also many natural problems in the Ciudad Blanca area. Besides the risks of physical injury like drowning via crossing rivers by swimming, your canoe possibly overturning, and the illnesses which occur in the jungle such as malaria, dengue, and various fevers brought on by insects or by getting wet in the downpours and never really drying out, there are poisonous snakes in the area.

 The Lance de Fer snake, known locally as barba amarilla (yellow beard) in Spanish, is the most feared. If the Indians do not treat you for snakebite immediately in the rainforest, you will likely not get out alive. Other poisonous snakes reside in the area such as the “tamagas” -- a species of deadly viper. Chris Stewart and Chris Begley reported in the book Jungleland seeing poisonous snakes every day they were in the rainforest in the area thought to be the Ciudad Blanca area, including on one occasion being eye to eye with a poisonous snake on a rock they had planned to climb up on.

Chris Stewart’s new book Jungleland on looking for the Ciudad Blanca  is  exciting reading, partly in terms of the search of a lost city, but mostly as  an adventure story detailing  some very hard and dangerous expeditioning—no electricity, no bathrooms or running water, no dry clothes, no roads, jungle river trips by dugout canoes, bandits, snakes, guns, rainforest Indians few people have heard of (like the Tawahka), rainforest spirits including ghosts of dead Indians and the Uhlak, a spirit that protects the Tawahka rainforest, no hotels not even even beds, and no stores or restaurants to rely on.

A number of people in Honduras, Gringos, Ladinos, Garifunas, etc.  have been excited about the possibility of eco-tourism and adventure tourism related to the Ciudad Blanca area,  described by Honduran radio announcers as “bigger than Copan Ruinas”. Copan is the sprawling Honduran Maya site in Western Honduras, which to this day has only been partially excavated, with only 3 of 20 neighborhood excavations opened to the public.   The classic era (300-900 AD) city of Copan, in the valley of Copan, was the capital of a state also known as Copan which extended into Guatemala at least as far as Quirigua in Izabal Province and in the Camotan and Jocotan municipios of Chiquimula and probably the Esquipulas region of Guatemala,  in Honduras to the north of La Entrada, Copan, to the east almost to Quetzalaica, Copan and the Belen Gualcho area of Ocotepeque and to the south to include most of the Ocotepeque Department in Honduras and the Western and part of Central El Salvador to the Rio Lempa border.

Most Hondurans have no idea how big Copan as a state or city was, and even professional archaeologists have paid little attention to the parts of the Copan state outside of the Copan valley, so whether the Ciudad Blanca which is probably a Postclassic (900-1500 AD site) based on the ceramics of the region is actually bigger than classic era Copan the city, the valley or the state can not even be guessed at.

Reading Chris Stewart’s book does not encourage the idea that significant tourism will arrive any time soon to the Ciudad Blanca area.  Gringo visitor family, friends and academics complain about the 7 hour bus ride from San Pedro to Trujillo on a paved road to visit me, so the likelihood that they want to take a chicken bus,  and then a several day boat ride up the Patuca and Rio Guampu, then hike in the perilous rainforest to the vicinity of the major reported archaeological sites in the Ciudad Blanca area sounds highly unlikely. If the Patuca III dam is finished in the area of Patuca, Olancho, until recently under construction by the Chinese who left when their lives were threatened by local people, it will be even harder to actually get to that part of the Patuca and its tributary the Guampu River, which leads to some of the archaeological sites described in Chris Stewart’s book which are primarily accessible by motorized canoes.

 Ted Danger’s attempt to go by helicopter  to the coordinates of the Ciudad Blanca that he had from a professor analyzing satellite data  which showed large stone structures was thwarted by heavy jungle canopy so that the helicopter landed miles away on another river system and his video shows a lot of hard trekking with rented mules through the jungle. The campesinos or Ladino peasants Ted Danger and Chris Stewart run into in the area along the Rio Guampu and other rivers and streams in the headwaters of the Rio Platano, either leave the area by mule or mostly on foot, such as one man Chris met who wanted to go and see his sick son, several days away of hard travelling by foot and then by local buses that stop everywhere and so are called “para-para” (stop stop) by Hondurans and travel over dirt roads in poor condition.

My friends and family complain about not having electricity several hours a day several days a week in Trujillo. These people do not want to trek to see the Ciudad Blanca in the rainforest with no running water or electricity, nor to sleep in a hammock suspended above raw jungle floor. Just the question of what to eat in the Honduran rainforest, with no restaurants and poor Hondurans with little or no food to spare, is a monumental and seemingly insurmountable problem, which Christopher Stewart courageously describes. There are Honduran protected area laws and regulations  which prohibit the bringing of infrastructure like electricity lines or new roads into the Rio Platano Biosphere area.

When the Tawahka Asagni Biosphere Reserve was first declared, people had visions of lots of tourists coming to see the rainforest and the Tawahka and Miskito indigenous cultures who live there. The Tawahkas built extra rooms on their houses to have somewhere to house the tourists. However, the reality is that only a handful of intrepid travelers have ever arrived, and many of them were  development workers,  anthropologists, geographers or ethnobiologists.

Since the problems with crime have increased in Honduras in general, there is almost no tourism at all to the Rio Platano Biosphere reserve, reports Pech Indian Juana Carolina Hernandez’s family in Las Marias—a village 7-hours up the Rio Platano on board a motorized dugout canoe after flying or taking a bus or truck to Palacios or Bataya on the Coast.

The recent  Lidar study to try to find out where the Ciudad Blanca is, reportedly cost $1.5 million, provided by the Honduran government, reported Honduran anthropologist Dr. Lázaro Flores. Given Honduras’s tremendous cash flow problems for paying for even basic services like the teachers and the doctors, this does not sound like a good investment, and especially to find a ruin that has already studied and mapped at significantly less cost. The hope of many Hondurans, foreigners, and funding agencies that the Ciudad Blanca will eventually provide significant eco-tourism dollars will probably not pan out.

 Even the idea behind Ted Danger’s video and SEPH group that publicity for the Ciudad Blanca site would eventually result in its protection from looters or benefit the local people and inspire them to protect the rainforest around the site also probably will not pan out. In Trujillo where there are two national parks, one to protect the water supply of the city in the mountains and another which is supposedly a wildlife refuge next to the Guaymoreto Lagoon and in theory protects mangroves and areas where shrimp and fish reproduce, few tourists and almost no local residents go to these parks and while the parks have important ecological functions, generating eco-tourism dollars is not one of them.

In Honduras if the government decides to develop a Honduran Indian religious site for tourism such as Copan Ruinas, when the Maya-Chortis previously held ceremonies, photographed by the early archaeologists, or the Caves of Taulabe where the Lenca Indians were still holding religious ceremonies relating to the bringing of rain into the 1950’s according to anthropologists Rafael Girard and Doris Stone or sacred mountain areas like Celaque National Park in the Lenca area, the first thing the government does is take the site away from the Indians, fence it and prohibit ceremonies there and prohibit the entrance of Indians without paying admission. In this context, it is not surprising the Pech Indians do not want to say which large archaeological site in the Mosquitia is the Ciudad Blanca.

The development associated with these ceremonial sites usually does not include the Indians, such as the fact that Honduran government shop at the Copan Archaeological Park does not now and has never sold Maya Chorti Indians crafts in spite of several attempts to get them to do so, and only after several takings of the Park and blocking entrance to tourists for several days were the Chortis given the right to be hired as guards, more than 50 years after the opening of the park. The Honduran government also had  not paid these guards for months denounced the Chorti in their protest this year.

Land values go up in areas of tourist development and there is more taking of indigenous lands, such as the Bay Islanders having lost 75% of the land there to tourism enterprises mostly since the beginning of the cruise ship industry there, reports Artlie Brooks, the Bay Islander author of Black Chest on the 2012 book on the History of the Black English speakers  or the land sales in the Trujillo and Santa Fe areas in the Garifuna area of Colon or the Tela area of Atlantida designed to attract foreign tourists and residents. House lots in the Trujillo and Santa Fe areas not on the beach go for between $10,000 and $20,000 and in the Bay Islands land on the beach in West Bay was selling for $1 million the acre. No land is available in West Bay now, that was previously a swamp for hunting crabs. How are the poor Garifunas and Bay Islander young men going to be able to have land to build their houses at those prices?

 Honduran anthropologist Lazaro Flores said the Honduran government should make sure the local Indians have some benefits if they are going to develop the Ciudad Blanca area, but given the Honduran government’s past practices, this seems unlikely to happen. In Trujillo it is noticeable that almost all the new infrastructure projects related to tourism, like paved or new dirt access roads, a new cruise boat dock, housing projects for Canadian retirees, etc. have hired few or no Garifuna laborers, even though Trujillo and Santa Fe Garifunas lost land for these projects to be built, have skills to do these jobs, and Enrique Gutierrez, the now deceased head of the Garifuna program Jovenes del Futuro (Young People of the Future) personally offered to find Garifuna cement workers, electricians, etc. who they could have confidence in for the Canadian developers.

Renewed Interest in Ciudad Blanca Sparked by new Books,  Movies, and Technologies

By Wendy Griffin

Christopher Stewart’s new book Jungleland   describes  his and US archaeologist Dr. Chris Begley’s search for the Ciudad Blanca, the supposedly “lost city” hidden in the Honduras  Mosquitia, with all of the discomforts and dangers that you can imagine in the rainforest.  Stewart compares his journey to  the story of Theodore Morde’s hunt for the same site. Morde, an explorer commissioned by the New York City Heye Foundation, later turned OSS agent in Europe, launched an extensive expedition to Honduras in the late ‘30s and wrote a book about his find published by the UNAH in Spanish in 1941 La Ciudad de Mono Dios (The City of the Monkey God).

 Stewart’s new book is part of the reason  for renewed interest in the Ciudad Blanca.  A National Geographic documentary and even a part in a popular movie called Xenda where psychics had to receive a message from extraterrestials in the Ciudad Blanca area also contribute to the interest,  however the recent NBC news releases and Honduras Weekly reports by Maggie Begley on the same Ciudad Blanca were generated because of another group of seekers, this time led by filmmaker Steve Elkins.

Elkins and his LiDAR laser ranging team were looking for Ciudad Blanca with a technology that could see the terrain and tree tops, and through processing, strip the tree elevation noise out, revealing underlying topography.  Elkins announced they had pictures showing extensive mounds and platforms of what the group speculates is Ciudad Blanca at a scientific conference, and would start to produce a documentary soon on ground showing the truth of their LiDAR data in the fall. This new  information including the photos of the structures at the reported  Ciudad Blanca site received very wide circulation in the US and Honduran media especially on the Internet, and even in Mexico and as part of the Wikipedia Ciudad Blanca website in English.

 Unfortunately, fall in the Honduran Mosquitia brings  heavy rains  and is not be the best time to travel there-- think deep mud and catastrophically flooded rivers. Additionally but not the least of an expedition’s dangers during rainy season include the Pech Indians of the region advice that,  “the lance de fer pit vipers (barba amarilla snakes) come out of their holes during heavy rains”, making it far more treacherous to travel on foot in the rainy season. The best time to travel in the area is the end of March beginning of April after several months of the dry season, when rivers are more passable and some of the mud has dried, reports explorer Ted Danger and the Pech ad Miskito Indians.

Christopher Stewart is a writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal in New York City and has had articles published in other prestigious magazines. His last book was on a completely different topic.  His first book, a non-fiction book tracking Arkan, the infamous Serbian warlord operating in the Balkans, had been well received.  However, Jungleland, his latest book in search of Ciudad Blanca has gotten far more notice than most of what had been previously written on the Ciudad Blanca partly because of the higher profile of the author. Stewart has a website promoting Jungleland, with additional author thoughts and photos of his perilous expedition into the Mosquitia jungle.

 Jungleland is published in English in the US, while most previous reports of the Ciudad Blanca area archaeology or legends or ethnohistory were either in other languages and or published in other countries. These reports include in German (Karl Sapper 1902), in Spanish but published in France(Eduard Conzemius 1927), and in Honduras  in Spanish (Theodore Morde, 1941, George Hasseman in Yaxkin and bulletin on the Rio Platano Biosphere,  also with a number of Honduran news reports like in El Heraldo during 2012) and the 1991 Lazaro Flores and Wendy Griffin book Dioses, Heroes y Hombres en el Univero Mitico Pech (Gods, Heroes and men in the Pech Mythical Universe)-published in El Salvador. Additionally, my 1992 historical volume La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras (History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras) and Miskito Indian Scott Wood’s new 2013 book, in Spanish published by the Honduran Ministry of Culture on the history of the Mosquitia which includes oral history and the Ciudad Blanca from the Miskito Indian’s point of view both explain in detail the history of the area, including some analysis of the archaeology. 

Several materials in English are available including  articles were written by myself and published in Honduras this Week are online and my book The History of the Indians of northeastern Honduras Prehistory to 1800-1994, is in some libraries in Honduras and the US in English (see google books). When Honduran anthropologist Dr. Lazaro Flores read the recent news stories about how no one knew anything about the Ciudad Blanca, his reaction was, “But what about all that we have published over the last 20 years? They did not even mention us.” Similar reactions  were reported among other people who had been to the area like Ted Danger. Rosemary Joyce, an archaeologist who has worked on the archaeology of the Department of Cortes (where San Pedro Sula and the Ulua River area  of Honduras are) for 20 years and also studies Mayas, wrote in her blog at the University of California-Berkely that the recent hype about the Ciudad Blanca and finding it by Lidar as reported by NBC news was good science, big hype, but bad archaeology.

A recent NBC news report about the Ciudad Blanca wrote that archaeologists and anthropologists  had thought that large civilizations could not exist in the rainforest of Northeastern Honduras or elsewhere in Latin America. Also in this report it said  that the Ciudad Blanca area ruins were unknown; that no one had ever seen said ruins; and we do not know who could have built these ruins, is disputed by professional archaeologists and other explorers and the Indians of the region.

Two long-time archaeologists focusing on Honduras, the now deceased George Hasseman and Chris Begley have given professional conferences and published peer-reviewed journal articles on a substantial pre-Columbian culture with temple mounds, plazas, and white stone paved roads.  Archaeologist, explorers, and Indians also report artifacts there also found other parts of Central America in the Postclassic period (900-1500 AD) such as the Sula Valley, the Naco, Santa Barbara area, the Copan area, the Bay Islands, the Trujillo area, the Valley of Agalta (San Esteban) in Olancho in Honduras and the Pipil dominated part of Western El Salvador which are also found throughout the Ciudad Blanca region. Some of these artifacts seem to have relations with ceramics and gods known in the Cholula Valley in Puebla and Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico in Central Mexico in the classic period (300-900 AD).

Dr. Chris Begley of Transylvania University in Kentucky, USA. worked with the National Geographic on a documentary movie on the Ciudad Blanca, according to National Geographic’s website.  The  www.mosquitia.com website notes that this documentary was shown on national TV (in the US, not in Honduras) in 2012.  This website, notwithstanding its title, does not discuss the contemporary Miskito, Pech or Tawahka indigenous peoples living in the vicinity of “the Ciudad Blanca”.  The website is strictly about the Ciudad Blanca myth and the possibility of visiting the Mosquitia with US archaeologist Chris Begley.

Contemporary explorers like Ted Danger and others have made available their visits to the Ciudad Blanca area  on Youtube.com. The website associated with this video www.roatanet.com/ciudadblanca does have descriptions and some photos and descriptions of some of the archaeological artifacts found in the area.

Canadian geographer  and cartographer Derek Parent’s explorations and mapping work indicates that there are various significant ruin sites  in this region. The Ciudad Blanca myths vary from ethnic group to ethnic group and the current Spanish name may encompass numerous sites over a large area between the Rio Paulaya and the Rio Platano in the Honduran Mosquitia.  Many of these sites have already well visited by the current indigenous, Ladino, and contemporary explorers and archaeologists. For example, in Chris Stewart’s book Jungleland after almost a month in the forest and being wet and uncomfortable and in danger,  he realizes sadly that the Ciudad Blanca is not lost, that not only has it probably been found, but also mapped, studied, and professionally reported. No hero’s welcome was going to await him back in New York that he personally had found the “lost” Ciudad Blanca.

Explorers in the area report Ladino children as young as 8 or 10 saying, “Oh sure, I will show you where the Ciudad Blanca is.” Ladinos have shown at least 8 different significant sized sites to Dr. Chris Begley saying this is the Ciudad Blanca. The Pech working with anthropologists mention at least two different sites for the possible location of “Kao Kamasa” (the White house) where the Pech hero Patakako was buried, which is the importance for them of Ciudad Blanca, which has a different base than the Ladino or Nahua Indians legends of the Ciudad Blanca, which could refer to completely different archaeological sites.

The early 20^th Century Honduran cartographer Jesus Aquilar Paz marked a discrete Ciudad Blanca toponym with a question mark on his seminal 1930s Honduras map and put Casa Blanca --the Spanish translation of the regional Pech indigenous name “Kao Kamasa” (White House)-- on the map. This obviously casts doubt on any claims that no one had seen the ruins -- at least in this geographical locale.

 The Pech Indians and other peoples residing in the Mosquitia also report seeing these ruins. Spirits bother the Pech and Miskito Indians who visit the site if they try to remove ancient artifacts, and, according to the Pech effectively hide the ruins from gringo outsiders, that only the Pech shaman and his followers could go there,  reported Pech Indian Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres (the Pech co-author of Los Pech de Honduras) and Miskito Indian Scott Wood the author of La Mosquitia Desde Adentro (The Mosquitia from the Inside).

Hernandez Torres’ son-in-law and his hunting partner had visited the ruins while out hunting, but spirits touched them and threw rocks and sticks, and did not let them sleep when his partner tried to take one piece from there. They put it back and the spirits stopped bothering them. Several temple mounds in the area associated with the Ciudad Blanca have Ladino clay (bahareque) houses erected on them, occupied. The ruins have convenient stone paved paths down to the rivers, and are higher up above the mud, making this ancient infrastructure far easier to build a jungle farm house on than the uncleared, unlevel muddy raw ground found in this rainforest.

Besides the actual stone buildings and roads and house mounds, which the local Indians consider tombs of the dead Indians who used to live there, there are also special burials in the caves in the Mosquitia, such as mummies in the caves of Warunta, reports Miskito Scott Wood in his book La Mosquitia desde Adentro. While Miskito Indians can see the cheeks and everything of the mummies in the caves, if they try to take them out they disintegrate.  Scott Wood considers these mummies may have been of the Rah. Cave burials in Post Classic contexts have also been professionally reported in the Trujillo area of Honduras, and Post Classic grave goods have been offered for sale from caves in the Culmi/Ciudad Blanca area. Both the Trujillo area in the Postclassic and Miskito reports of the Rah in the Mosquitia after the Conquest period  may be associated with Nahua speakers. For example, the stone carved statues of chiefs found in the Trujillo area and in the area near Puerto Cortes are wearing kidney shields. This style that was introduced by the Toltecs reported archeologist Michael Coe in his book Mexico.

Chris Begley’s analysis that the ruins in the Ciudad Blanca were large and built of stone and which he assumes were built by the ancestors of the contemporary Pech was presented at a 1992 official Honduran government sponsored seminar organized by IHAH (Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History) in honor of the 500^th anniversary of the Discovery of America. My analysis that these ruins were not built by the Pech, but rather by the Mesoamerican neighbors and enemies of the Pech according to Pech legends and an analysis of the ruins, probably Nahua speakers, was presented at the same conference in 1992. This analysis has been on the Internet on the website www.roatanet.com/ciudadblanca since 2000, contemporaneous with Chris Begley’s doctoral dissertation submission at the University of Chicago on the archaeology of the Ciudad Blanca region.

 According to the 2012 El Heraldo newspaper interview with Chris Begley (published on the Internet), conducted at the La Llorona archaeological site in the area of Ciudad Blanca, retired historical geographer Dr. William Davidson who specialized in the ethnogeography of Honduras  and a specialist in Central American Nahua speakers Dr. William Fowler now believe the ruins in the area were probably built by Nahua speakers, but Dr. Chris Begley disagrees. Dr. Robert Carmack, a well respected ethnohistorian of Mesoamerica in his map of the Legacy of Mesoamerica, indicated Nahua as the language of Trujillo/Aguan Valley/Agalta Valley at the time of Spanish conquest. It is not clear from the map if he intended to include the Olancho Valley and the Culmi, Olancho/Ciudad Blanca area as Nahua speakers at the time of conquest also. 

The Pech report in their oral tradition and myths that they lived in the mountains above the Agalta Valley, the Culmi/Rio Paulaya area, and near the Sico River  and Rio Negro/Rio Tinto valleys and travelled above the Catacamas, Olancho valley region, but they said if they went into the valleys, including the Olancho Valley around Boqueron and the colonial city of San Jorge de Olancho,  they got ambushed and captured, and were never heard of again, so they hunted and lived in the mountains. Most of the place names around current Pech communities in Olancho, including near the Ciudad Blanca area, are not in the Pech language.

The Spanish sometimes called some of these other Olancho Indians in the colonial era “quire” Indians because their town names often ended in “quire” like Conquire, Aguaquire,  Jamasquire and Pisijire. Even Catacamas was sometimes written “Camaquire”. While Atanasio Herranz has a theory that –quire may be related to the Lenca word –quira for stream (quebrada), but no one is sure what language these place names are in. Other place names in the Catacamas, Culmi and San Esteban, Olancho muncipios or counties like Petaste (vegetable pear or chayote in Honduran Nahua and Spanish), Aguacate (Avocado in Honduran Spanish and Nahua),  Malacate (spindle whirl for spinning cotton in Nahua and Honduran Spanish) mountain, river and village and La Llorona, the Spanish name of the Siguanaba or Sihuanaba (spirit of woman in Nahua), are clearly Nahua Indian related. One cave offering outside of Catacamas, Olancho was found in a community  of “quire” Indians  and was reported by US archaeologist Doris Stone. The Nahua Indians of the Catacamas area are still angry that the Honduran government came and took away this offering made by their ancestors, reported the Indians to UPN students and professors.