An ancient city full of treasures could be buried by the jungle in an unexplored area of South America, between Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil.

It's not the plot of the last Indiana Jones movie, but the story of the city of Paititi, the golden city that an Inca legend, disclosed by the archaeologist Oscar Nunez del Prado in 1955, wants it to have been founded by the hero Inkari, emerged from the waters of the Titicaca Lake and also founder of Q'ero and Cuzco.

Paititi, the legendary Inca golden city

The legend of Paititi is parallel to that of Eldorado and there are references in some Spanish writings of the sixteenth century, but it had new impetus in 2001 when the Italian archaeologist Mario Polia found in the Jesuit archives in Rome a story of the Spanish missionary Andres Lopez of the seventeenth century which describes a large city rich in gold, silver, and jewels, located in the middle of the tropical jungle near a waterfall, called Paititi by the natives.

Another Italian archeologist, Laura Laurencich Minelli (died April 8, 2018), Professor of Demo-Ethno-anthropological Disciplines at the University of Bologna from 1973 to 2005, then worked on the codes inherited from the Neapolitan noblewoman Clara Miccichelli and particularly on the Exul Immeritus Blas Valera Populo Suo of the Jesuit Blas Valera, inside which there are two significant drawings dating back to 1618 that represent the cordillera where, according to Valera, Paititi would have been found.

The Paititi outpost has yet to be studied

Despite thirty or so explorations in search of the fabulous city since 1925, Paititi has not yet been discovered, although in 2017 four local guides, Javier Pazo, Benancio Encalada, Belisario Alvarez and Justo Puma, have found buildings similar to those of the Inca civilization they have baptized “the outpost of Paititi” in the jungle north of Cuzco, near the above plateau “Mesopotanic” of which many satellite photos have been circulating on the internet for years.

However, no professional archaeologist has yet analyzed the area, just as it remains to be reached and explored “square mountain” which stands on the summit of the plateau where many speculate may be the same Paititi. He should try to reach it in 2019, using a helicopter or a boat, an Italian researcher, Marco Zagni.

Will 2019 be the year of the discovery of the Inca golden city and its treasures?

Zagni, known for having rediscovered the lost city of Marcahuasi in 2011 on a mission on behalf of the transmission Voyager by Roberto Giacobbo, already in 2016 he had explored a nearby area, the Lacco Valley, full of petroglyphs and Amazonian symbols of an astronomical and symbolic nature.

At that point, perhaps we will know if Paititi and its treasures really exist or if the legendary lost city of Inca civilization will continue to hide beneath the surface of the Amazon jungle, regardless of the progress of technology, that thanks to the use of laser light in aerial thermography have already allowed rediscovering dozens of Mayan ruins in Guatemala.