Lost city

A lost city is an urban settlement that fell into terminal decline and became extensively or completely uninhabited, with the consequence that the site's former significance was no longer known to the wider world.

The search for such lost cities by European explorers and adventurers in Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia from the 15th century onward eventually led to the development of archaeology.

The Spanish did not rebuild the city, and the location went unrecorded and was forgotten until it was rediscovered through a detailed examination of period letters and documents.

In 1911, Melchor Arteaga led the explorer Hiram Bingham to Machu Picchu, which had been largely forgotten by everybody except the small number of people living in the immediate valley.

[5] Nevertheless, Peruvian explorer and farmer Agustín Lizárraga predated this discovery by 9 years, having found the Inca site on July 14, 1902.

In 1994, in collaboration with the University of Patras, a magnetometer survey was carried out in the midplain of the delta, which revealed the outlines of a buried building.