A Gold Bug On The Trail Of The Conquistadors

A Gold Bug On The Trail Of The Conquistadors

- Laura Millan and Danielle Bochove

Inside a Vatican library, Keith Barron leans over a 17th century tome bound in red leather. “The country is the richest in gold in all the Indies,” reads one passage. “The natives are cannibals and very warlike, and devastated the city of Logroño de los Caballeros, massacring the Spaniards and burning the churches.”

Barron, a geologist, amateur historian, and professional gold hunter, is on a mission. Ecuador’s two “lost cities of gold” exist only in legend and in fragments of old texts such as this, which was written by a Spanish priest traveling through the region a half-century after the settlements were destroyed. Spain eventually gave them up for lost after dispatching more than 30 expeditionary missions to reclaim them. Barron and a team of researchers have spent years sleuthing around the Vatican library, the immense General Archive of the Indies, in Seville, Spain, and in small churches and other document repositories scattered throughout Latin America. With the aid of colonial-era chronicles and maps, they’ve narrowed their search to the Cutucú mountains, 230 miles south of Quito.

Buried somewhere in this lush jungle range lie the ruins of Logroño and Sevilla del Oro, two of the empire’s most prodigious 16th century mining towns where, according to accounts at the time, laborers using primitive methods managed to extract about 4,100 troy ounces of gold in a single year. (A troy ounce of the precious metal is worth $1,262 at today’s prices.) Barron is betting old-fashioned gumshoe techniques coupled with modern aerial surveys will lead him to tunnels, piles of rocks, musket bullets, horseshoes, or even the bells that tolled when the cities were under attack from indigenous tribes. “If we find the cities, we find the gold,” he says.