Economics
He Struck It Rich in Ecuador. Now He’s Looking for the Lost Cities of Gold
On the hunt with Keith Barron, an Indiana Jones who blends history with geology to dig up treasure in hostile terrain.
Keith Barron is deep inside a Vatican library, hunkered over a 17th century tome bound in Moroccan red leather. “The country is the richest in gold in all the Indies,” reads one passage. “The natives are cannibals and very warlike, and devastated the city of Logroño de los Caballeros, massacring the Spaniards and burning the churches.”
A geologist by training, amateur historian and professional gold hunter, Barron is on a mission. Ecuador’s two “lost cities of gold” exist only in legend and in fragments of old texts like this one, written by a Spanish priest traveling through the region a half century after the settlements were destroyed.