Zarahemla (/ˌzærəˈhɛmlə/)[1] is a land in the Book of Mormon that for much of the narrative functions as the capital of the Nephites, their political and religious center.

Most adherents of the Latter Day Saint movement regard the Book of Mormon as a translation of a genuinely historical text from the ancient Americas (a belief that mainstream academic archaeology does not corroborate).

[7] Zarahemla is identified as a descendant of Mulek, narrated to be a son of the biblical king Zedekiah; Mulek According to the Book of Mormon, the Nephite Mosiah and his followers "discovered that the people of Zarahemla came out from Jerusalem at the time that Zedekiah king of Judah, was carried away captive into Babylon" (about 587 B.C.).

Ammon led a quest in search of a colony that had left the land of Zarahemla in order to resettle a city named Lehi-Nephi.

In 1841, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation instructing Latter-day Saints in Iowa to establish a city across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo, Illinois and name it after Zarahemla.

[26] A settlement of Latter-day Saints, located across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo and south of Montrose, Iowa, was called Zarahemla.

[34] The second book in author Gary Stewart's Gabe Utley detective series, published in 1986, is titled The Zarahemla Vision.

[42] In an elaborate geography constructed from the Book of Mormon's text, Latter-day Saints George Reynolds and Janne M. Sjödahl supposed Zarahemla was located along the Magdalena River in Colombia.

[44][e] Benjamin Cluff, then president of Brigham Young Academy, from 1900 to 1901 led an expedition, mostly comprising students, to try to discover evidence of the city of Zarahemla in Colombia, in accord with Reynolds and Sjödahl's proposed geography.

[46] Six of the group reached the Magdalena, but they turned back after learning that civil conflict had destabilized the region, ending their expedition.

[47] Margarito Bautista in his 1936 La evolución de Mexico: sus verdaderos progenitores y su origen: el destino de America y Europa expressed his belief that Book of Mormon peoples were the ancestors of indigenous Mexicans, and he superimposed Zarahemla onto the region north of Panama, somewhere in Guatemala, Honduras, or southern Mexico.

[51] Religion Dispatches reports that the Heartland model movement rests on American nationalism and espouses white supremacy and Euro-American colonialism.

[53] The horses, chariot, clouds, and fleeing crowd also resemble those of Nicolas Poussin's paintings The Conversion of St. Paul and The Death of Hippolytus.