Last week, the story of an alleged lost city in the amazon won the social networks: Ratanabá. The theory, classified as unfounded by experts, deals with a civilization that is said to have inhabited the forest region more than 450 million years ago.

However, this is not the first story about the Lost Cities that is nothing more than hearsay. For this reason, O GLOBO has listed five other lost cities which, in fact, are only legends.

atlantis

First mentioned by the philosopher Plato, the island of Atlantis has always been linked to the first peoples to inhabit the American continent. The site is said to have been the seat of an ancient civilization that existed in the Atlantic Ocean, Western Europe and Africa.

However, the piece of land would have been submerged thousands of years ago, following a geological cataclysm (drastic changes to the surface of the Earth, leading to major disasters). According to Plato, however, the island would have been devastated around 9,600 BC, sinking into the sea.

According to the Mega Curious portal, the legend aroused the interest and curiosity of explorers for more than two millennia, as they believed that the region was home to a kingdom with advanced technology for the time.

Cities of Dubai

Nowadays, Dubai is a symbol of wealth and modernity, with a lot of income coming from the tourism, real estate and financial services sectors. However, the region’s deserts may hide stories that date back to the first inhabitants of the place, as well as ancient cities that were forgotten after drastic climate changes in the past.

The most famous of the towns would be Julfar, where the legendary Arab sailor Ahmed ibn Majid was said to stay. According to legend, Julfar prospered for a thousand years before falling into ruin and disappearing from human memory.

lost city of z

In 1925, archaeologist Percy Fawcett came to Brazil to “brave the jungle” and find a lost city, which he nicknamed “Z” (“cradle of all civilization”, according to him). According to Portal Amazônia, Fawcett’s theory indicates the existence of a pre-Columbian city in the region where the state of Mato Grosso is currently located.

Midway through the expedition, however, Fawcett and his team vanished without a trace, and despite rescue missions, he was never found. The trip is said to have been conceived after Fawcett found a document in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, called Manuscript 512, about a walled city deep in the Mato Grosso region of the Amazon rainforest.

Eldorado

El Dorado was said to be an extremely gold-rich civilization that could make anyone a millionaire, prompting bounty hunters and historians to make several expeditions in search of the lost city, located in Latin America.

According to Mega Curioso, the origins of El Dorado come from the legendary tales of the Muisca tribe, which occupied the regions of Cundinamarca and Boyacá, in Colombia, but which were not necessarily cities. So far, there is no evidence to prove its existence.

Kalahari

Currently a large desert located in southern Africa with more than 900,000 km², the Kalahari has been described by explorers since the end of the 19th century. In 1885, Canadian Guillermo Farini became one of the first Westerners to cross the region’s desert. Upon his return, he wrote about the ruins he discovered which seemed to point to the remnants of a lost civilization buried there.

During the 20th century, dozens of expeditions were launched to find the “lost city of the Kalahari”, as described by Farini. In 2016, aerial and radar scans showed man-made ruins near a local oasis, but no lost towns have been confirmed so far.