Fawcett's Lost City & Ingrejil the "lost City" of manuscript 512

In my previous post, I mentioned Gabriel D'Anunzio Baraldi (1938-2004) an Italian amateur archaeologist and paranormal researcher, who believed in Atlantis, who reached Brazil, and were proto-Hittites. He wrote about this, and also about a Lost City in northeastern Brazil in his book A Descoberta Doc.512 — The Discovery Doc. 512, (1997), which ties up ancient megalithic builders with Percy Faucett's lost city of the Amazon. Interesting stuff, that makes for good-selling books aimed at gullible readers who believe in this sort of trash.

Percy Fawcett

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawecett (b. 1867 - disappeared 1925), and pictured above (Source), was a man of his Victorian and Edwardian times. He was born in Britain, and his career as military took him to Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), he was also a surveyor and geographer, member of the Royal Geographic Society. In 1902 he visited Morocco as a British spy with an cover as an archaeologist, and in 1906 the border dispute between Bolivia and Brazil took him to South America, which he explored between 1906 and 1925. He was fascinated with the idea of a lost civilization in the Amazonian jungles and set out to discover its ruins.

In 1925 he set out with his son, Jack, and one of his son's friends, Raleigh Rimmel, to discover the Lost City that he called "Z". It was located in the South-central Amazonian region, along the basin of the Paraguay River in a region known as Mato Grosso. They vanished without a trace and were never seen again. The jungle, disease, and the natives were surely the cause of their disappearance.

Fawcett was persauaded of the existence of "Z". South America had its Eldorado and Lost City of Caesars, and Hiram Bingham III had discovered Machu Pichu (well, taken there by a local native guide) in 1911. Why couldn't there be a lost city hidden in the jungles of Brazil?

Manuscript 512

Furthermore, Percy is said to have seen a document known as Manuscript 512. This document is archived at the Livraria Publica da Corte (nowadays the Biblioteca Nacional or National Library of Brazil). The author is unknown, but it is attributed to a Portuguese bandeirante (men who organized and led incursions into the jungles to capture natives that were then sold as slaves), by the name Joao da Silva Guimaraes.

The manuscript was discovered by chance in 1839 by Manuel Ferreira Lagos, a naturalist. Nowadays it is known as "512" with the title "Relação historica de uma occulta, e grande povoação antiquissima sem moradores" (the manuscript's text is included as Annex 4, you can also read it here, in Portuguese), the name can be translated as "Historical narrative of a large, occult, and very ancient town without residents".

The bandeirantes, during one of their indian-hunting incursions in 1753, came across the ruins of a city, with arches, statues and temples. The narrative does not disclose where the city is located, but describes it in detail.

They came across a bright mountain (due to the crystals it contained), following an albino deer they found a narrow path that let up the mountain where they came across the city. Three stone arches marked its entrance (Arches were unknown to Amerindian constructors, they used beams for dorways, Romans invented the arch). There were inscriptions on the stone. The houses were built with bricks, and empty, no furniture or decorations. The town had a main square with a black column on which there was a statue pointing north. The corners of the squares had needles. There were large buildings around the square, one was a temple with many sculpted figures, crows, and crosses. The place seemed to have been struck by an earthquake. Nearby there was a large river. They followed it upstream and by a waterfall, three days later, they came across many caves with slabs of stone and inscriptions. There, they found a gold coin: "Our companion, named Joao Antonio, found in the ruins of a house some gold money, round in shape, larger than our six thousand four hundred coins: on one side with the image, or figure of a young man kneeling, and on the other side a bow, a crown, and an arrow.". They had explored the region of the Una and Paraguacu rivers in Bahia. One of the bandeirantes wrote a letter to the authorities in Rio de Janeiro telling about their adventure. It originated the manuscript. Source.

The interior of the state of Bahia in Brazil has a region (now a National Park), on the Paraguacu River, with caves, waterfalls, and plateaus (Chapadas) it is known as Chapada Diamantina (the second part of its name is due to diamonds found in the area). The place has great scenery and rock formations that could induce you to imagine that there is a city somewhere in those mountains.

However, Percy didn't head into the interior of Bahia, site of the manuscript's lost city. His city was located in South-central Brazil, in the Mato Grosso (Thick Jungle) region along the Xingu River. World War I delayed his plans, and his 1920 expedition failed, so he set out again in 1925, and vanished.

Map showing Percy Fawcett's last expedition to the Lost City of "Z". Source

Ingrejil the Lost City

This "city" was discovered in 1984 by Gabriele D'Annunzio Baraldi together with two archeologists: Aurelio Abreu and Luis G. Moreira Jr. It is located in Bahia, and it was immediately linked to the city mentioned in manuscript 512.

The discovery became known in Sept. 1984, when the media announced that "A Brazilian archaeologist Sunday said he has discovered ruins of a legendary stone city dating from Incan times and sought by explorers for centuries in the country's remote interior. Aurelio Abreu, vice president of the Sao Paulo Archaeology Institute, said he and two researchers found 'ruins of a structure of stone giving the impression of a fortress and dating from remote times' in the mountains of Bahia state 700 miles north of the capital."

This city was very far from where Fawcett was trekking, it is northeastern Brazil, 25 km from the town of Brumado, 1400 km - 900 mi from Percy's "Z". See it in Google Maps.

Baraldi described the archaeological site as heavily altered by miners (searching for diamonds). The terrain had been artificially leveled, and there were large stones arranged in lines, they could be the foundations of large buildings or markers for some kind of astronomical or solar observatory. Some stones are set at right angles, there are some mounds shaped like pyramids, which he interpreted as temples. Abreu said that the "ruins" were very different from the work of paleoindians. He believed that the city's residents had come from Peru during the Inca period, or even earlier, and they settled there in the mountains of Bahia because it was similar to their Andean homeland. Baraldi, on the other hand, thought it was 4,000 years old, far older than the Inca empire.

A paranormal researcher, Yuri Leveratto wrote a book about American mysteries (Exploracoes na America do Sul 2006-2011) in which he suggrests that Ingrejil is much older than what Baraldi believed, Leveratto says it is at least 10,000 yers old and that due to the climate change prompted by the end of the Last Ice Age, the inhabitants of Ingrejil migrated west, into the Andes, and were the ancestors of the later Andean cultures. Sounds like the pre-Clovis advanced civilization in North America, in a South American version.

Natural or man-made?

The images below seem to indicate that the dolmens, menhirs, arches, and walls are natural geological formations. Rocks that form part of the ladnscape in the Serra das Almas. The locals named the place "Ingrejil", which is a deformation of the Portuguese word igrejinhas: "small churches" due to the shapes of the rocks.

The Brazilian Centro Nacional de Arqueologia, IPHAN has listed it as a site, and describes it as follows: "ruins of an unknown civilization. They are located on a plateau in the Serra das Almas [Range of Spirits] in the municipality of Livaramento de Nossa Senhora - BA. In the leveled area there is a water spring, menhirs, foundations, artificial hillocks and a parabolic rock."

But I could not find one single formal research paper about Ingrejil, no archaeologist or researcher has written any papers about this "city", no excavations, nothing!

Some images of the Lost City of Ingrejil

I did find some photographs, which you can see below. See many more images here. They seem to show natural rock formations, like eroded volcanic dikes, and jagged rock crests.

The first image depicts rocks that seem to have been placed in groups of three, upright in the ground (Source):

The next two images (Source) show a Dolmen, Pedra do Bandeira (Flag Rock), and the three-fold menhirs:

Below are two more views (Source) with the "parabolic antenna" and a the hillside with a rock "wall".

The final image (source) shows the valley with the stone "structuress".

Closing Comments

The tale of the lost city described in the manuscript is interesting, the gold coin is unexpected, but lacking a better description we couldn't say where it came from (was it an Inca jewel, or some European coin, or even older?). Fawcett was blinded by his zeal to discover his own lost city, and that led to his death in the jungle.

Ingrejil is a natural rock formation, it isn't a lost city. There were rumors of a similar lost city in Patagonia, where the Chelep dwarves lived, and where Aonikenk Chief Papon found a large gold nugget, a story repeated by a professor Wolf - Wolff or Wolfe who saw it in 1922. However, it turned out to be a natural lava formation with walls that were lava dikes.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Pseudo-science Hancock and America's ancient "Lost Civilization"

I recently mentioned the Younger Dryas event that followed the end of the Last Ice Age, that had some significant impacts on the global environment causing cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, and warming in the Southern. It coincided with a critical moment some 12,000 years (12 kya) ago when humans were expanding across America, and filling in the final voids across Eurasia and Oceania. A few millennia later, agriculture would be discovered, and the shift from nomad hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers would take place, and shape the course of our history. Villages, writing, civilization would soon appear.

There have been different theories trying to explain the cause of the Younger Dryas event. I mentioned them in my post, the impact theory, though criticized, sounds interesting. Catastrophism is rejected by mainstream science due to philosophical reasons. Catastrophic events are unpredictable and cannot be explained by the deterministic methods of hard science. But sometimes a catastrophe takes place: One wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Mya). The Toba volcano's eruption 50-100 kya is another example. The Deccan Traps lava sheets 65 Mya are just some examples of them.

Hancock and the ancient pre-Dryas Civilization

But, when a wild hypothesis uses one of these events to justify a weird idea, that idea becomes pseudo-scientific. This is precisely what happens in Graham Hancock's book about a pre-Younger Dryas advanced civilization that spanned the world, and thrived tens of thousands of years ago. Hancock proposes that was exterminated by the meteor that provoked the Younger Dryas. (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization).

In his previous works Hancock describes this civilization as advanced, and its survivors taught primitive people the basics of civilization after the catastrophe.

These advanced people were "Caucasians" and they inspired the "bearded whit men" effigies found in South America (See his Fingerprints of the Gods), which smacks of racism. They also used their mental power to move objects and read minds (telekinesis and telepathy)!! This is almost like Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods from the late 1960s rebooted but using human instead of alien agencies! I have posted critically about "White Indians" and "Bearded men", finding them baseless theories with a hint of racial discrimination.

American native people were smart human beings. They built mounds and mounuments, they discovered agriculture and domesticated animals by themselves, they used script for records, and developed religions, and astronomy (for practical purposes like all civilizations). They developed artistic skills, worked metals and built water craft. We don't need to imagine any advanced civilization teaching them anything. There were no extinct ancient superhumans behind the mound-builders in the U.S. or the Amazonian natives, or common beliefs from these ancients that shaped religions. After all, the human mind is a common factor linking all cultures globally, and its repertoire is rather limited when it comes to religions —sun, moon, lighting, life after death, etc.

But piling speculation upon genuine facts, Hancock's book suggests that: "Recent scientific discoveries show that North America was first peopled at least 130,000 years ago... they are unexplained connections between the spiritual beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and the spiritual beliefs of the mound-builder cultures of North America's Mississippi Valley... The remains of hundreds of gigantic geometrical earthworks have recently been found in the Amazon jungle. They have unexplained resemblances to the equally grand and mysterious earthworks of Ohio, such as the Serpent Mound, and the Newark and High Bank Works, and to other geometrical and astronomical monuments as far afield as Stonhenge in England and Angkor in Cambodia"

Objections

I am no expert, and my blog has plenty of speculation, but I try to be realistic and base my speculation of facts and sound science. But in Hancok's book this is not the case.

Bringing together Stonehenge built 5,000 years ago, and Angkor Wat built 900 years ago, is ridiculous. They are two unrelated structures, one, is a roughly hewn megalithic set of stone circles with a few hundred gigantic rocks built during the Neolithic, the other a temple-citadel with galleries steeples, bass-reliefs and millions of sandstone blocks, by a modern nation contemporary with the Crusades in Europe. They could not be more different.

Regarding Egyptian and mound-builder religions and their similarities. We can only conjecture about the latter. The Egyptions left documents in writing, the mounds lack written evidence. We can only speculate about mounds and alignments pointing at stars, solstices and equinoxes. We know the Mayas had an advanced astronomy, so did the Chinese, does that make them similar to the Egyptians?

Mounds and Mound-builders

The Amazon earthworks are impressive (Watling et al., 2017):

"With ditches up to 11 m wide, 4 m deep, and 100–300 m in diameter, and with some sites having up to six enclosures, the geoglyphs of western Amazonia rival the most impressive examples of pre-Columbian monumental architecture anywhere in the Americas. Excavations of the geoglyphs have shown that they were built and used sporadically as ceremonial and public gathering sites between 2000 and 650 calibrated years before present (BP), but that some may have been constructed as early as 3500–3000 BP. Evidence for their ceremonial function is based on an almost complete absence of cultural material found within the enclosed areas, which suggests they were kept ritually “clean,” alongside their highly formalized architectural forms (mainly circles and squares)—features that distinguish the geoglyphs from similar ditched enclosures in northeast Bolivia. Surprisingly, little is known about who the geoglyph builders were and how and where they lived, as contemporary settlement sites have not yet been found in the region. It is thought that the geoglyph builders were a complex network of local, relatively autonomous groups connected by a shared and highly developed ideological system. Although some have proposed a connection between the geoglyphs and Arawak-speaking societies, the ceramics uncovered from these sites defy a close connection with Saladoid–Barrancoid styles normally associated with this language family, and instead present a complex mixture of distinct local traditions. Furthermore, it is likely that the geoglyphs were used and reused by different culture groups throughout their life spans."

They are a local, regional, trans-cultural phenomenon, unrelated to North American mounds of the U.S.

Serpent Mound was built ~1120 AD (Source) by a local Fort Ancient Culture, and the High Bank Earthworks, built by the local Hopewell Culture 1600 to 2000 years ago (AD 400-1000).

The Amazonian mounds of Colombia are far older. But, there are also more recent mounds, ditches, canals and causeways built between AD 400 and 1400 in the Bolivian savannah of Moxos (Prümers, et al., 2022). It is an area subject to seasonal flooding so the locals built ridges (camellones) to grow crops above the flood level, and channels to drain them. Semiurban, farmland not mounds with religious functionality. Then are the Ecuadorian Amazonian mounds (Rostain et al., 2024) are part of an agricultural society that flourished between 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD, with a road system dozens of kilometers long linking villages, and drainage systems; it was a local (endogenous) development. Finally the Brazilian mounds (Peripato et al., 2023) and earthworks, which may number 10 to 24 thousand in the Amazon region. They are many different types: fortified plaza-villages, roads, drainage systems, geoglyphs, defensive and ceremonial walls, dated to 500 to 1500 AD.

A theory from the 1800s

Hancock's work echoes the publications of the late 1800s, when American scientists studied the earth mounds of East-Central USA and attributed them to an advanced race. They considered the Native Americans lacked the ability and civilization to have built them.

Below is an imaginary scene of "An American Battle Mound" from "Traditions of De-coo-dah..." by William Pidgeon (1858), which, by the way, in its Chapter XXXV mentions "The extinction of the Mound Builders" in which the author discusses geologic factors (the Noachian Flood) that wiped out the antediluvian civilization of mound-builders!!

1800s Ancient American Battle Mound. Frontpiece of the book

Another example of that mindset is the following quote from "Extinct races of America — the mound builders by Charles Morris, 1870: "Abundant evidence has been found of the previous existence throughout a great portion of the territory of the United States, of a race of people much more civilized than the Indians, and differing widely from them in character. This race has left monuments of its existence upon our soil in an intricate system of earthworks, designed for defence, worship, sepulchre, and other unknown purposes..."

Summarizing, Hancock rehashed obsolete ideas from the 1800s about ancient civilizations, barbarian Amerindians, and Noachian Floods, tying them together with Egypt, Tihuanaco, and Asian civilizations. Good material for a gullible public, with a thirst for this type of entertainment.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©