Ciudad Blanca of Honduras

La Ciudad Blanca (pronounced: [la sjuˈðað ˈblaŋka], Spanish for "The White City") is a legendary settlement said to be located in the Mosquitia region of the Gracias a Dios Department in eastern Honduras. This extensive area of rainforest, which includes the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, has long been the subject of multidisciplinary research.Archaeologists refer to it as being a part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area of the Americas, one in which the predominant indigenous languages included those in the Chibchan andMisumalpan families. Due to the many variants of the story in the region, most professional archaeologists doubt it refers to any one actual settlement, much less one representing a city of the Pre-Columbian era.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés reported hearing "trustworthy" information on a region with "towns and villages" of extreme wealth in Honduras, but never located these. In 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh reported seeing a "white city" while flying over eastern Honduras. The first known mention by an academic of the ruins under the name Ciudad Blanca (White City) was by Eduard Conzemius, an ethnographer from Luxembourg in 1927. In his report on the Pech people of Honduras to the Society of Americanists, he said the ruins had been found about twenty-five years previously by someone looking for rubber who got lost in the area between the Paulaya River and the Plantain River. He said it was called the White City because its buildings and a wall around it were white stone.

In 1939, adventurer Theodore Morde claimed to have found a "City of the Monkey God". However, he never provided a precise location for this, a place that later sources equated with Ciudad Blanca. Morde died before returning to the region to undertake further exploration. Explorer Tibor Sekelj searched for The White City in 1952 on a small, unsuccessful, expedition that was financed by the Ministry of Culture of Honduras.