Mystical systems
Lost City of Z
Direct answer
Lost City of Z: The Lost City of Z is the name the British explorer Percy Fawcett gave to an ancient city he believed stood in the forests of Mato Grosso, Brazil, and which he vanished seeking in 1925.
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At a glance
- Also called
- percy fawcett lost city, fawcett expedition
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- El Dorado, Atlantis, Pseudoarchaeology, Ancient Astronauts
The Lost City of Z is the name the British explorer Percy Fawcett gave to an ancient city he believed stood in the forests of Mato Grosso, Brazil, and which he vanished seeking in 1925.
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Did Percy Fawcett find the Lost City of Z?
Percy Fawcett was a British army officer and surveyor who mapped frontiers in South America for the Royal Geographical Society from 1906. Over several journeys he became convinced that a great stone city, older than any known in the Americas, lay hidden in the interior of Brazil. He called it simply Z. Part of his evidence was a Portuguese manuscript of 1753 describing ruins found by treasure hunters; part was hearsay; part came from occult ideas he held about Atlantis.
In 1925 he set out with his son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell. They were last heard from on 29 May, and no trace that has stood up to examination has been found. Fawcett's city was never located. Archaeology has since shown that parts of the southern Amazon did hold large, planned settlements before European contact, though not the stone city he imagined.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Lost worlds.
What sets Lost City of Z apart
Z is unusual among lost cities in being one man's private hypothesis, with a letter for a name. Fawcett kept its supposed position deliberately vague, fearing rivals. His argument joined three unlike things: a colonial document, his own sightings of pottery and earthworks, and occult writings on Atlantis. The first two were sound leads. The irony noted by later researchers is that the earthworks he walked past were the real remains, less grand than his city and more remarkable.
- Named by: Percy Harrison Fawcett (born 1867), British surveyor
- Region: Mato Grosso, Brazil, towards the Upper Xingu
- Written source: Manuscript 512, dated 1753, National Library of Brazil
- Last message: 29 May 1925, from Dead Horse Camp
- Companions: his son Jack Fawcett and Raleigh Rimell
- Later archaeology: Kuhikugu settlements, Upper Xingu, reported in Science, 2003
Often mistaken for something else: El Dorado began as a report of a gilded chief and became a city of gold sought by many; Z was one explorer's theory of a ruined stone city, sought mainly by him.
The story behind Lost City of Z
The manuscript Fawcett relied on, known as Manuscript 512, is kept in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. His last letter was sent from a place he called Dead Horse Camp. Many search parties followed over the next decades. From the 1990s the archaeologist Michael Heckenberger, working with the Kuikuro people of the Upper Xingu, mapped clusters of settlements with ditches, causeways and plazas, published in the journal Science in 2003. David Grann's book The Lost City of Z appeared in 2009.
Why Lost City of Z matters
Lost City of Z shows how a wrong picture can sit near a real discovery: the forest did hide large settlements, of a different kind.
How to read Lost City of Z
Writers tell the story for the lure of the unexplored; archaeologists cite it when explaining what Amazonian settlements were really like.
Lost City of Z in practice: an example
A reader of Fawcett's letters can mark where he reports what he saw, and where he repeats what he was told.
Where readings of Lost City of Z go wrong
Stories of what became of Fawcett are many and unconfirmed, and bones once claimed as his were shown not to be.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- city of z, percy fawcett lost city, the lost city of z, fawcett expedition, what was the lost city of z
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Did Percy Fawcett find the Lost City of Z?
No. He disappeared in 1925 on the expedition meant to reach it, along with his son and a companion. No stone city matching his description has been found.
Was there really a lost city in the Amazon?
Not the one Fawcett pictured. Research in the Upper Xingu and elsewhere has revealed networks of large earth-built settlements from before 1500, with roads, plazas and defensive ditches.
What happened to Percy Fawcett?
It is not known. His last message is dated 29 May 1925. Numerous accounts of his death or survival circulated afterwards, and none has been confirmed.
