
One of the great lost-gold legends of South America, and it starts with a documented event. When the Spanish garrotted the Inca Atahualpa in 1533 after taking his ransom of gold, the general Rumiñahui was said to be bringing a further enormous load of it, and on hearing of the killing he hid it in the Llanganates, a labyrinth of freezing, fog-drowned, trackless paramo in the Ecuadorian Andes. Hunters have died there for four centuries. The mountains are real and merciless; nothing has ever been found.
The Llanganates, Andes (Ecuador)
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