Ciudad Perdida

11.0361°N, 73.9218°W.

Ciudad Perdida — the Lost City, also called Teyuna — in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Magdalena Department, northern Colombia. The Tairona urban centre was built between approximately 800 and 1550 CE and is one of the largest pre-Columbian cities surviving in the northern Andes. The site consists of approximately 169 stone-paved circular terraces ascending the mountainside, connected by 1,200 stone steps over a vertical rise of 1,200 metres. Original peak population is estimated at 2,000–8,000 inhabitants. Ciudad Perdida was abandoned in the late sixteenth century during the Spanish conquest of the region, was never located by the Spanish, and remained known only to the indigenous Kogi, Wiwa, and Arsario peoples until 1972 when looters from the lowland town of Santa Marta discovered the upper terraces while hunting for treasure. Excavated by Colombian state archaeologists from 1976 onward. The site is reachable today only by a four-day jungle trek with mandatory indigenous guides.

A Tairona city the Spanish Empire never found, rediscovered four centuries later by treasure-hunters and now guarded by the descendants of the people who built it.