James Stewart

Established explorers like Gonzalo Pizarro, Philip Von Hutten, and even Sir Walter Riley all led separate expeditions from 1541 to 1617.

The result?

Well, nothing but disaster, death, and the further conquests of the indigenous people.

But the allure of finding the unfindable endured well into the 20th century too, when British explorer Percy Fawcett became obsessed with finding the riches Oriana had described centuries earlier, fuelled by the fire of one main objective, to find what remained of a lost city he called Zed.

He focused on the western Amazon in Bolivia, and the southern Amazon in Brazil, but found nothing.

Along the way he did encounter indigenous people, but found them living in small villages.

A far cry from the huge cities the rumours had promised.

Rather than deter him, this seemed to spur him on even more.

He even wrote to his wife in a letter that she need have no fear of failure.

Yet on the 29th of May 1925, on his eighth Amazonian expedition, Fawcett headed into the jungle from a place somewhere in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil known as Dead Horse Camp, never to be seen again.

For decades after this last hurrah, really, scientists concluded that this place was simply too hostile, too inhospitable for humans to thrive, and was largely just an expanse filled with exotic flora and fauna.

Feedback among the scientific community was that the rainforest soil was so poor it simply could not sustain large-scale farming, and therefore cities were impossible.

But they were all missing something, something that actually Fawcett had been onto.

because it turns out he was looking roughly in the right places, but maybe he was looking for the wrong things.

Now, up until this point, the rainforest had done a pretty phenomenal job of camouflaging its secrets.

But just five years ago, everything changed.

scientists finally found the lost cities of the Amazon, because this time they had something these explorers didn't.

They had lasers.

Yeah, I know, not what I was expecting to say either, but this is pretty amazing.

In the end, the tool that cracked open this mystery is LiDAR, light detection and ranging.