Exploring Ciudad Perdida | Lost Cities With Albert Lin

[music playing]

ALBERT LIN: It's literally a city in the clouds. Maybe those Spanish stories weren't just legends because that's what a real lost city looks like.

HELICOPTER PILOT: [inaudible] 1 0 1 2.

ALBERT LIN: That's Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City. Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City, is high up in Colombia'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 over 500 years ago. Digital technology will help them reveal more and faster. [chuckles] Only the world's toughest archaeologists can handle this terrain.

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: It was like [spanish],, looters. And then the archaeologists came in. Took them about a week to get here. And they were led by other looters.

ALBERT LIN: Looters led the way, huh?

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: 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, you know, more than 80 pieces of gold from one burial.

ALBERT LIN: Wow.

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: Gunfights for gold. Archaeology gets dangerous when gold is involved. And this place is bursting with it. Who built all this?

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: It was a people that we call the Tayrona. Their predecessors, the [inaudible] built it around 600 AD. It's huge. [music playing]

ALBERT LIN: How many people would've lived here?

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: About 2,000 to 3,000 at its peak. And then about 10,000 people living in the upper part of the basin.

ALBERT LIN: 10,000?

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: Yeah. All that forest that you see would have been all farmland. Aw, man, you can almost feel their energy here, you know? Like all these people running around.

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: It's taken us over 40 years of work to clear out and survey the site, trying to tease out what these people were thinking when they were building it.

ALBERT LIN: 40 years?

SANTIAGO GIRALDO: Yep.