9 Legendary Lost Cities That Have Actually Been Found

 9 Legendary Lost Cities That Have Actually Been Found

At this point we’ll probably never find the actual city of Atlantis from the ancient myths, or the City of Gold – El Dorado, but nobody can tell us not to look for them, right?

Sure, maybe all these places are just myths and legends, that some bright soul dreamed up and wrote a novel about. They were just flights of our imaginations, thoughts of what wonders the world could hold.

But there are real places poor soul made up to make their adventures in a faraway land seem more exciting, and that’s fine, but some of the stuff that the modern explorers have uncovered really makes you question if those were real locations. Some of those “lost cities” have been found!

So if they were real, it might mean that all other legends had at least some truth in them.

Let’s set out to explore 5 lost cities that have actually been found!

1. Helike

Could this be the legendary Atlantis? Sure looks like it is, but who said Atlantis was the only sunken city in the Greek mythos? The city of Helike went down under in a single night, and according to Greek myths, Helike was destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon – the god of the sea.

Helike was destroyed in 373 BC, and for hundreds of years it remained an old tale… until it was found in the late 1980s. According to the archaeologists, the disaster that destroyed it was a huge earthquake that liquefied the ground, turning the very earth into water. On second thought, that’s exactly what Poseidon would have done.

2. Xanadu

Xanadu (or Shangdu) was Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome where he spent those hot summers days. When Marco Polo visited in 1275, here’s what he said: “a very fine marble palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds…”

Sadly, today not much of that old shine remains. It was a real paradise on Earth… before the Ming army destroyed it in 1369.

3. Sigiriya

Way way back in 5th century Sri Lanka, King Kassapa thought of the best place to build his royal palace – just put it on top of a 200 meters tall boulder!

According to the legends, it was one of the most incredible castles in the world. As of today, UNESCO declared Sigiriya the Eighth Wonder of the world, but for quite some time, it was nothing more than the forgotten ruins of a deposed tyrant.

4. Vinland

In AD 1073, a German cleric named Adam of Bremen spoke to the Danish king Sven Estridsson. The Vikings, Estridsson told him, had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and found a distant land where everything grew boundlessly. “It is called Vinland,” the cleric reported, “because vines grow there of their own accord.”

He wasn’t the only one telling the story. The Vikings had been passing it down themselves, saying they’d fought with natives who lived there, whom they’d named the Skraelingar. The Skraelingar, they said, dressed in white clothes and lived in caves and holes. When they attacked, they carried long poles and charged, screaming out loud cries of war.

Vinland was thought to be a Viking myth for centuries, even after the Spanish reached the Americas. It took until the 1960s until we found out they were telling the truth. Then, at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, archaeologists found the remains of a Viking settlement made in the 11th century—the Vinland they’d told so many stories about.

5. La Ciudad Blanca

Hernan Cortes was so greedy, that when he heard rumors about a city of gold hiding in the jungles of Honduras, he nearly lost it! It was called the White City, or the City of the Monkey God.

Thankfully, Cortes never found it, so the legend lived on, until one day a group of archaeologists followed the clues left by one of the crazy locals, and, believe it or not, they actually found the city where the wacko said it would be.

Sadly, there was no gold to be found, but they did uncover a pyramid in the middle of a rain forest, built by a long lost civilization that had vanished 1,000 years ago. So that’s something.

6. Dvaraka: The Home Of Krishna

To a Hindu, Dvaraka (sometimes spelled Dwarka) is as sacred as a city can be. It is the ancient home of Krishna, the supreme personality of the God Head, who lived on the Earth 5,000 years ago.

Dvaraka was built by the architect of the gods under Krishna’s own orders, who demanded a city made of crystal, silver, and emeralds. He also demanded that 16,108 palaces be made for his 16,108 queens. In the end, though, the city was destroyed in a massive battle between Krishna and King Salva, who annihilated it with blasts of energy.

It all sounds like the last thing you’d expect to have any truth in it—but when archaeologists started exploring the sea where Dvaraka was supposed to have been, they actually found the ruins of a city that fit the description. It didn’t have 16,108 silver palaces, but it was a major ancient city with the same layout, and the rest fit as just a little bit of embellishment.

There’s reason to believe the real Dvaraka might have first been built 9,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest cities on Earth. At its peak, it was one of the busiest seaports in the world. Then, in the second millennium BC, it collapsed into the water, just like in the legend.

7. Great Zimbabwe: The Medieval Castle Of Africa

In the early 16th century, Portuguese explorers started reporting that they’d heard legends about a castle in Africa. In the land today known as Zimbabwe, the natives told them, was a stone fortress that towered over the trees. The locals called it “Symbaoe,” and even they didn’t know who had built it.

One explorer wrote home, “When, and by whom, these edifices were raised, as the people of the land are ignorant of the art of writing, there is no record, but they say they are the work of the devil, for in comparison with their power and knowledge it does not seem possible to them that they should be the work of man.”

or centuries, Europeans thought Symbaoe was just a superstitious story. Then, in the 19th century, they actually found it. There, in Zimbabwe, was a massive castle with stone walls more than 11 meters (36 ft) tall.

The castle was made in AD 900 by an African civilization that has been lost to time—but they were incredibly connected. Inside the fortress, relics were found from all around the world, likely gathered by trading with other countries. There were Arab coins, Persian pottery, and even relics from the Chinese Ming dynasty.

Great Zimbabwe is more than just a castle. It’s proof that a lost African civilization, forgotten to history, had trade routes that connected all the way to China.

8. Leptis Magna: The Roman City Buried In Sand

A massive Roman city in Libya that was once a major trading hub for the empire was buried in a sandstorm.

The city is called Leptis Magna, and it was the place where the Roman emperor Septimus Severus was born. He turned it into a gigantic city and one of the most important parts of his empire, but when Rome started to fall, Leptis Magna fell with it. It was pillaged by raiders, destroyed by Arab invaders, left in ruins, and completely forgotten until it was buried under the drifting sands.

Leptis Magna spent about 1,200 years buried under sand dunes until 19th-century archaeologists found it. Buried under the sand, the city was almost perfectly preserved. They didn’t just find a few broken pots there; they got to unearth and walk through a whole ancient Roman city.

Leptis Magna still has an amphitheater, baths, a basilica, and a circus, all preserved so incredibly by the sand that they look almost exactly how they would have when the city was in its prime. It’s like stepping into a time machine. It’s a lost, forgotten city—and because it was forgotten, it never had to change.

9. Heracleion: The Drowned Egyptian City

Heracleion showed up in almost every Greek myth. It was the city where Heracles took his first steps into Africa. It was the place where Paris of Troy and his stolen bride Helen hid from Menelaus before the Trojan War. And we had no idea where it was.

As it turned out, there was a reason we couldn’t find one of Egypt’s most important ports: It was underwater. About 2,200 years ago, Heracleion was likely hit by an earthquake or a tsunami—and it drowned.

Divers swimming off the coast of Egypt stumbled upon it in the early 2000s. They found a strange rock under the water, and when they brought it up, they realized that it was a piece of an ancient statute. They dove back in to see what else was there. Soon, they’d found full statues, jewels, and even the drowned ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple.

A massive part of the city was still intact. Divers were able to find huge steles put up as notices to visitors, warning them, in hieroglyphics, of Egyptian tax laws. They found statues of ancient Egyptian gods, still in their original form, with fish swimming around them. It was an entire lost city, pulled from the depths of the water and brought back to life.