The Legends of El Dorado: City of Gold (Full Episode) | Lost Cities with Albert Lin

the jungles of Colombia South America this is where the legend of Al Dorado was born Spanish cisors they heard these local Tales of a King near here who was covered in gold dust and then the story it just kept growing to describe entire cities covered in this stuff deep in the jungle high in the mountains while the Spanish never found those fabled civilizations they also didn't have the technology that we had have today my name is Albert Lynn and I look at the world in a unique way I use 21st Century Technologies to look back into our past check that out I can actually fly through the secret ancient world lasers that scan deserts strip away dense jungle canopy and scour the oceans to uncover the Hidden Worlds beneath we're waiting into uncharted waters now I have the military helping me find lost cities new discoveries in the most a inspiring places on Earth that's where pixels become reality that fill the gaps in our story who we are where we came from and the Wonders we can achieve here we are in the 13th century this is carved out of the earth huh this is the new Golden Age of Exploration we know their secrets the mountain ranges are so steep the whole area is almost entirely cut off from the outside like a lost world over the past 50 years the whole area was mostly dominated by local drug lords and the far gorillas but now that archaeologists are beginning to make their way back in they're finding traces of these unbelievable civilizations once not totally lost wow it's literally a city in the clouds maybe the ban stories weren't just Legends because that's what a real lost city looks like one2 that's CAD pida the lost city CAD prida the lost city is high up in Columbia's most isolated mountain range the Sierra Nevada archaeologists have spent decades exploring this dense jungle to find out about the people who lived here here over 500 years ago digital technology will help them reveal more and faster only the world's toughest archaeologists can handle this terrain Santiago Heraldo has been Excavating here for 20 years it's a beautiful place it's amazing this place is still standing who discovered it it was guacos looters and then the archaeologist came in took them about a week to get here and uh they were led by uh other looters looters led the way huh yeah it's actually pretty incredible because they were they got into a shotgun fight the looters were after the Gold that's in the burials and one looter came out with uh you know more than 80 pieces of gold from one burial oh yeah gunfights for gold archaeology gets dangerous when gold is involved and this place is bursting with it who built all this there was a people that we called the tyona their predecessors began to be built around 600 AD it's [Music] huge how many people would have lived here about 2 to 3,000 at its peak and then about 10,000 people living in the upper part of the Basin 10,000 yeah all that Forest that you see would have been all [Music] Farmland oh man you can almost feel their energy here you know like all these people running around [Music] it's taken us over 40 years of work to clear out and Survey as a site trying to tease out what these people were thinking when they were building it 40 years the reason why soon becomes clear travel out here is intense Santiago and I had for CAD Antigua a recently discovered tyrona site it's only like 12 km 7.5 miles or so from CAD P where we just came from that's if you took a straight line that is kills your guts it's a real gut Banger this thing come on we just had a helicopter now we're in a 4x4 and we still got to foot it through some of the craziest jungle the tyrona built their homes on the steepest Ridges of this thick dense jungle from here they could see everything around them safe in the mountains they remained hidden for centuries they're one of the most mysterious people in all of South America and finding their ancient cities in this terrain it's almost [Music] impossible these roots are incredible yeah it's a it's fig tree this is what I wanted to show you see that right there the Rocks see that yeah yeah is that a wall yeah that's a wall W it's a taona wall so that's how we find them out here you wouldn't even see it I mean honestly it looks like a pile of rocks no for the most part that's to the untrained eye that's what they look like but uh but yeah that's wall wow it's incredible I mean you barely recognize it well you know we've got like 400 years of uh growth and leaf litter and soil how long did it take to find this place uh after SE podo hunt oh it was it was a good like 14 15 years around 1989 1990 15 years yeah lots of walking lot of bush whacking I think there's a better way to do this you know we could use aial lar could a digital model the whole place then we could remove the trees and see the ground we could find the pathways The Rock piles that would be amazing if it if it does pick up these Terraces it would be really really amazing it would be fabulous maybe we'll even find some new ones lar should be able to strip away the trees to expose the ground beneath them across this whole area including terrain that has yet to be explored the lar scanner shoots about 400,000 laser pulses every second each pulse creates an accurate distance measurement which we can use to build a 3D model however there's a problem the whole jungle here is incredibly thick to test my technology first we'll scan a small area around CAD pida if that works we can scan the whole valley this has never been tried here before or in totally Uncharted Territory we don't know what we'll find it could be more lost cities or it could be nothing but what we do know is that this chance is just too good to [Music] miss not much is known about the tyrona but what we do know comes from the Spanish Invaders who arrived in the 16th century these streams they run all the way down to the coast of the Caribbean it's about 15 miles or so as the crow flies that's the same Coastline where the Spanish first landed in 1501 you know they were looking for gold and they found it and there's this Spanish friy and he describes the tyrona in this way they had feathered ornaments worn on top of huge plaques of polished gold there was no Indian male or female that would not have sets of jewelry containing ear ornaments necklaces nose rings and crowns all of them made in Gold those first encounters with the gold Laden tyrona sparked the myth of Eldorado but this myth has its roots in fact there is gold in these [Music] Hills you see a tiny little Flash but when the Spanish arrived and they saw that everyone was wearing gold ornaments they thought that these mountains bled gold that's that's actual gold little tiny tiny little Flex yeah right there look at that that's gold they're microscopic almost wow with the tyrona have used these kinds of pools to find it we don't know how it was uh you know so to speak probably panned and you know collected tiny bit by tiny bit until they had enough to make one of the gold or moments the Spanish conquistadors they were obsessed by the tyrona gold there's not much of it left looters have seen to that but there is a stash kept hidden away in a vault in [Music] Bata [Music] Bogata Colombia I've got behind the scenes access to a vault of tyrona gold at the Bano de la republ gold [Music] museum look at all this I'm meeting Dr Juanita sser an expert in tyrona jewelry this is tyrona gold yes this tyrona gold work they're so detailed these are a pair of earrings they were used just like these I look does it look good on me yes it looks very nice it's pretty big this is so intricate look at that well this is a great pendant it might represent a a man and a bat and a bird as well let me show you in the microscope and here you can see the details that's amazing they're tiny little feet holding on upside down yes it's so cool but also this this in here some tiny little birds these details are literally you know the thickness of your hair that's what it looks like wrapped around in the most incredible weaved patterns [Music] unbelievable wow what is that this is a necklace you want to can I hold it wow wow it's heavy yeah look at that I have my head here between this piece of jewelry and I actually realized that some human four or 500 years ago wore this exact piece just like this is this pure gold no it's not pure it's an alloy made out of gold copper and silver these are these are gilded pieces so how thin is the gold layer on the exterior well we I can show you in here this like a Sandy or porous lar in here it measures 5.8 microns wow that's incredible that's incredible the tyrona metal Smith melted together gold copper and silver to make an alloy once set the piece was burned over a flame and then dipped in acid solution made from a local herb these chemical processes brought the gold comp compounds to the surface creating a gilded exterior so basically the Spanish show up they see all this stuff they think it's gold but actually it's just got this layer on the very exterior the thickness of a of a spider's web that is actually gold and that's it yes I guess the the Spanish didn't know that at first right no they thought it was all gold the tyrona were able to craft complex pieces out of tiny amounts of gold but it was just enough to fuel the spaniard's fantasies back at CAD pra it's the Moment of Truth the light R test Skins are in and if it worked will you'll be able to see the world of the tyrona like never before hey man oh great the data is in yeah check this out you going to like this oh wow okay I've never seen it without the trees well yeah unless you cut them all down then I can actually change the angle of the sun here this is wonderful look at that but you can see all the paths these paths they follow the terrain off of this Central Terrace on the Main Ridge and they kind of go out in every direction web of Pathways yeah you can continue like drawing these out and because it's all about connection it's not like anything I've ever seen in any other city it's I there's no walls There's No Boundaries there's no squares it's nothing it's all open it almost looks like this neural network yeah how long has this place been abandoned for oh just about since 1600 so 100 years ago yeah there's been jungle growing over this for 400 years how is it still standing oh these guys were wonderful Engineers they really were and and good design really stands the test of time design what do you mean you've got so much rain out here it's just ridiculous we've got over 4 meters of rain per year so 4 M yeah like 12 13 ft yep that's exactly right it just rain cats and dogs how would that not just erode and destroy all of those a good portion of the engineering and the design and the architecture is meant to work as a water management system we would to have the roof right and then all that water would have course down down staircases and so you've got runoff water moving very rapidly down slope and just make it all try again very quickly the whole thing was designed as a massive gutter system also that's awesome yeah that's what has preserved the site actually using the liar data we built a 3D model of CAD pra and look at this W boom without the trees we can see sad PR as it was 500 years ago transported through time we can move through the city following the footsteps of the people that once lived here oh this is amazing we've got like the center part of the town and then all these paths to lead out to it and connect to the other neighborhoods imagine we've got dogs you've got kids playing you've got goldsmiths Weavers we've got Merchants we've proved that lar works here now we're going to scan the whole valley who knows what we will find hidden beneath the jungle canopy the test scans of c. prita Pro that the Light Art technology does work here now we're going to scan the valley if there are any other tyrona cities hidden under the jungle we'll find them okay so this is the sier Nevada range yeah this is this is the northern portion you can see it goes from the Caribbean up to snow caps pretty quickly I've pulled up a satellite map so Santiago and I can work out where to scan going rotate around so we can see the whole valley here all right that's the whole Basin that's lower portion upper portion and we got to right there okay so it' be kind of good to scan this whole area here what if we start off with this region here that would be perfect that would be perfect yeah I mean a drone can't carry the sensor because it's not you know it's too heavy um supplies are brought in to sad Pita every month via helicopter right yeah yeah that's right that's right maybe we can piggy back off of the helicopter that would be perfect yeah and then we can have it do these really tight paths this kind of grid pattern through this region that would be perfect that would be perfect that would be fantastic we mount an air lar Scanner with three lenses on a helicopter one lens faces straight down the other two are at Angles this maximizes the chance that some of the laser beams will make it through the canopy to the [Music] ground the aerial liar team gets to work scanning and processing billions of data points from the valley there's a clue to what the lighter scans might find underneath the tree canopy it's at the entrance to CAD [Music] Bida what is this well we call it the mapstone a mapstone look at these lines are these Pathways we think so look at these radiating little hubs here what are these are these it looks a bit like the pattern that you see inside Z where you've got like Central areas and radiating paths that lead in and out of the central area but we don't know exactly what it Maps out or what it represents see if we can match anything with the ground scan okay ready first I'll take a picture and then I'm going to Overlay the ground scan okay let's see this is the rock obviously and this is C got the Central Area the Terrace is right here doesn't really fit this at all try it out at a different scale if you if we reduce you think reducing yeah so you think it could be like smaller smaller smaller yeah there we go something like this around here yeah you can see that it's sort of at a different scale different scale yeah if if it's a map it represents a wider area doesn't really fit the town as such Santiago's right there may be more cities to find out [Music] there there is a pathway out of CAD prida it's a staircase made out of 1200 Stone steps heading towards the sea it's an intriguing lead need to follow [Music] up I've come down to the coast to meet Anthropologist Eduardo MAA this is where the legend of El Dorado began I didn't realize that the tyrona had a life here in the ocean I've been up in the mountains but they were here too yeah along the seashore is the taona would have had small villages where they would trade with the people in the higher lands what would they trade fish brought from the sea salt and sea shells from the lowlands and in the highlands they would have very refined textiles gold ornaments and ceramic so the Spaniards came here greedy for gold they saw gold moving from the mountains down to the coastline and fish moving back and forth did they ever try to work together did they trade with each other the Spanish and the tyrona they did they did trade but from the first period of contact the Spaniards had this Gold Fever so what happened here the Spaniards had guns and cannons but besides that they had a sort of biological weapon diseases tyus influenza small pox diseases which were new in the Americas and led to a of Apocalypse so the diseases they brought over on the backs of their own greed ended up wiping out almost this entire population practically the high death TOS were due to disease more than Warfare the few survivors that weren't infected with disease and weren't enslaved fled into the mountains and even though those Spanish conquistadors were so horrendous and so destructive some must have survived for that you should be some indigenous people who claim to be the descendants of the tyrona they still have same myths of origin and some of their Customs the indigenous population still live deep within the jungle covered mountains today I'm going to meet them to find out what they say happened to the tyrona and their gold high up in the mountains near CAD pra are the kogi they claim to be descendants of the tyrona Santiago introduces me to Jose Maria he's a kogi priest every culture has a origin story could you tell me [Music] yours do you think all the fathers and mothers of your people go back to the time of the tyrona they go back to the tyrona itself mhm do you think that they live in a similar way to how you live today it seems like for many years from the time of the story of El Dorado till now there's been a lot of people who have come here in search of gold because people took gold from the mountains the kogi believe gold lust has devastated their culture and the culture of their ancestors the tyrona but there's still traces of tyrona Heritage here that can't be seen at sad pida Jose Maria gives me his Blessing to preserve it in the best way I know how the lar scanner captures data points which build an accurate model of the Ki Huts back at CAD PR I used my technology to bring the scans of the kogi Huts to life this is so cool just feels like we're just peering back into time back to the time that the last tyrona lived here about 400 years ago it's kind of like making the invisible [Music] visible this technology allows us to see the city as a tyrona would have done finally the aerial liar team has finished processing billions of data points from the scans of the Valley now we can uncover all of the mountains in the tyron's world here it is light data is in yeah this is the whole oh my God okay I've sprayed it up against the wall so let me take a look so that's c p here yeah this is c p everything that you see in white that's flat that's what we're looking for that's the signatures yeah cuz white means flat flat means humans and that means terracing so what we're looking for is white oh look look look look you can see right there the path that leads up River can you pull out a bit more okay oh I want to see more I want to see more see if we can find some new areas [Music] oh look this this is new this is absolutely new right there this is new this area right here right there right there that rid line right there this area right there see that it's nice and flat highly probable that there's Terraces right there uh this is this we've never been there so you're telling me that this area up here could be an entirely new city could it could be a new site could be a new site could be a new town this is this is fantastic data a lost city in the mountains that you've never seen before could be but we need to ground Tru them we got to put boots on the ground and head out there and see for ourselves whether there's terracing and walls and just man-made structures that's that's where pixels become reality somewhere out there there's a lost city waiting to be found this is going to be tough we'll be bushwacking through some of the world's roughest terrain Santiago and I head off with the camera crew we've got the Colombian military with us because Bandits still roam this jungle and we can't take any chances before we can even start the climb there's a long Trek on the old tyrona path then it's hours of bushwacking up the ridge we spotted on the lar scans our goal is to get to the top of the ridge where the lighter showed large flat areas that we hope are the signs of a tyrona [Music] city it starts so well wow it's just so beautiful but it's not long before the real challenge begins how many machetes do we have among the crew got three four four machetes just take turn okay we're going to be going up trying to find a trail right by the side well let me pull out the data okay f up okay okay pull down so we are we are right here right here right there at 336 6 altitude 3366 ft okay we've got about 700 ft to go up the ridge line right up there somewhere the going up like that and if all goes well we're going be heading up this Ridge line or right beside it up up up toward this Plateau up here we're literally following a map made by lasers in the sky to the thickest jungle I've ever seen to look for new Lost Cities good fun this is just the beginning ahead of us is a 700 ft vertical climb on whatever pathway we can cut out of the harsh jungle we leave the old tyrona path and start to fight our way up the mountain looks like the trajectory kind of follows this Ridge up that way yeah should think the S is pretty loose oh man this is why jungle Archaeology is so hard deadly snakes are in this jungle if anyone is bitten they'll die before we can get them [Music] out this climb is harder than we could have ever [Music] imagined sorry oh oh oh you right after a brutal climb we finally have a breakthrough oh there we go don't just go out a pottery up here Pottery yeah are you serious yeah yeah yeah yeah look at that see bits and pieces of pottery right there oh yeah look at that see can you get the TR out please yeah here we go ancient Pottery see this one right there with this Pottery there's human being this is tyrona Pottery that's so cool guys come on up we got another one up here you got another one yeah we got another one up here another one it hasn't been looted there's no loter pits no looter pits means that this is an untouched sight what is it lip a a pot lip yeah wow look at this it's on a slope so it's coming from uphill look at that right there right down the side proof of of Life The Lost Civilization consumed by the [Music] jungle we follow the trail of pottery uphill it's like everywhere you grab something's trying to poke you or sting you this like jungle exploration meets mountain climbing hard work Whata we got a Terrace up here come on you got a Terrace yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah found a Terrace what yeah yeah yeah all right yeah you can see the wall right here here let clear that a bit see right there let me see yeah there it is see wall wall right here let me [Music] see see the Big Blocks of stone right here mhm and here the plink of stone stone St Stone right here more Stone right here Stone so you've never seen this before no we've never seen this before wow found three four five pares yeah all right these Terraces are a sign that the tyrona were once here right there but the site we spotted on the lar scan is still far above us or not even even halfway there let's go the Mountain's getting steeper and we're climbing at a 52° incline the humidity is reaching 100 you okay you all right this climb is unrelenting we're all struggling it's merciless and unforgiving come on we go up we go you see anything no yeah we're at 3893 ft for what yeah just over 4,000 we got to be getting close okay come on let's go if there's a city here the that it will have been built on a huge artificially flat space the white areas we saw in the lar scans you see anything oh yeah is we're finding out so want ter it's it's we've got we've got a lot of we've got a lot of forest over at but yeah that's all nice and flat the flat area looks like it could be a tyrona Terrace but to be sure we need evidence Pottery cut Stones anything to show that tyrona actually lived here the Hunt's on we spread out checking every inch of ground even the Army joins in maybe around the edges yeah probably around the edges I mean we need to spread out and see if we can find some walls watch out yeah yeah watch out for snakes without cold hard proof that the tyrona were here will have done all this for nothing and it makes sense right it's flat but we haven't seen any evidence yet right at the top of the ridge now you know if it's consistent with everything else around here this would have been where a tyrona city would have stood you got to find some evidence Beyond just the [Music] topography [Music] I see a rock right here this is a piece of Cut Rock just like a sudad p following it let's see if we can see it on the other side of this tree you see it over there yeah it continues over here good yeah yeah this yeah we got that one right there yeah another piece of cut rock you think this is the edge of a Terrace uh yeah I mean we've got the lung of that way the line goes that way so that's that's why we got that flat area right inside this is what we're looking for the edges Stone after Stone after Stone yeah yeah we got another one over here you got another one yeah we got another one yeah I think we found it down I think we found it I've got Pottery what yeah you serious got potery yeah yeah definely let me see it's a really small piece can you get some water and uh clean it up but yeah poy for sure wow look at that the tiniest fragment but it's enough that was going to be fun to excavate C for sure this was once somebody's home this city would have been part of the Great tyrona civilization from Mountain Toops to the Sea the lar scans uncovered this extraordinary Place reclaimed by nature and hidden under the jungle for hundreds of years and this is just the beginning with this technology you can discover dozens of new cities and possibly the whole tyrona civilization I think we can call that success yeah pretty good [Music] day

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 809,345

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, Albert Lin, Lost Cities, Ancient, Cities, Exploration, Adventure, with albert lin, Ancient history, documentary history, documentary now, documentary 2021, Nature videos, Explore the unseen, The Legends of El Dorado, City of Gold, Full Episode, Lost Cities with Albert Lin, Explorer, El Dorado

Id: yYaBiPzSaPI

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023