The lost city of Eastern Honduras was the first legend that captivated me.  Hernan Cortes heard about a fabled city - Ciudad Blanca - deep within the land east of here.  The White City, so named because accounts describe it as a city built of white limestone cut from riverbanks, is believed to have been a robust riverside city deep with the Mosquito jungle from the heights of Mayan civilization.

As Mayan civilization collapsed by 900 A.D., and its survivors grabbed to life in isolated pockets of Central America, the farthest outposts of civilization were swallowed up by the jungle.  Roads would have been the first to go; all evidence of their existence would vanish in a handful of years.  But the ruins of cities themselves disappear as well.  Temples become but bumps in the terrain, administrative buildings become the grappleholds of towering buttressed trees.  In time, everything vanishes.

Throughout the last five-hundred years, bits and pieces of the legend have surfaced.  Explorers, pilots and archeologists will from time to time claim having witnessed the city.  Photographs and hi-tech, high-altitude images appear sometimes.  But nothing is ever definitive and never scientific.

To this day, the lost city appears in the news from time to time, as some new group attempts its discovery.

Extraordinary stories, stories that verge on science fiction, entrance me, and few have entranced me as much as this one. I am a skeptic, and the reason the lost city has compelled me is that I could never break it; could never entirely conclude it to be complete nonsense.

In the last ten years, while following the news of the lost city, I started learning that lost Mayan cities were being unearthed throughout Mesoamerica, some of which, if completely excavated, could be as impressive as well-known ruins like Copán or Tikal.

Meanwhile, in Eastern Honduras itself, discoveries of artifacts have increased, and with it, more of an understanding of just how populated these now remote lands had been in the past.  The likelihood of an extravagant city waiting to be uncovered is certainly not supported by archaeologists.  But for me, the question has always been: how will future archaeological finds in Eastern Honduras shed light on a history that has been buried by time?