The treasure of Llanganates

Atahualpa’s lost ransom gold; hunters have died in the paramo

Atahualpa, held by Pizarro at Cajamarca, offered to fill one room with gold and two with silver for his freedom. The Spanish took the ransom and garrotted him anyway, on 26 July 1533. The legend begins with what was still on the road.

The Inca general Rumiñahui was said to be bringing an enormous quantity of worked gold north toward Cajamarca when word reached him that the emperor was dead. He turned the porters east into the mountains, went back to Quito for more, and hid the lot. He was captured and tortured by the Spanish and told them nothing.

Where it went, if it went anywhere, is the Llanganates: a range east of Ambato in Ecuador where the Andes fall away into the Amazon basin. It is páramo and cloud forest, permanently wet, permanently fogged, cut by ravines, and it has an evil reputation among people who work in mountains for a living.

There are two documents everybody chases. The Derrotero de Valverde is a set of route directions supposedly left by a Spaniard who married locally and was shown the place. Atanasio Guzmán, a miner working old Inca workings in the range in the late 1700s, drew a map. Both surfaced together: the botanist Richard Spruce found them in the archives at Latacunga in 1860 and published them through the Royal Geographical Society, which is how they entered the English-speaking world. They do not agree with each other. Guzmán's map leads to mines at the northern end of the range; Valverde's directions describe somewhere else.

Nothing has ever been found, and expeditions have been going in for over a century, some of which have not come out. The Llanganates are a national park now. Go trekking there with a guide if you want a genuinely wild Andean range. Do not go looking for gold.