Llanganatis Mountains: Valverdes Gold

Hi Kanacki,

I am slightly involved with these mercury discussions in CR and it is distressing.
A bureaucrat behind a desk thinks that his piece of paper will result in the non-use of mercury.
 

Hola Kanacki

that EPA paper is like a picture of a sculpture, missing a dimension or two
would like to see companion graphs showing capital investment and process control technology and maintenance costs
apart from the money, most artisanal miners have a HUGE information deficit - much more than a seminar can address

sugar, amazing
 

Yes I have keep a watchful eye over events. Many of countries in South America have extreme shifts in the political ideology. Sadly its either the far right or or far left both sides make promises they can never keep. The way I understand it the present government in Ecuador is in a lot of debt and to obtain funding from the world bank. The country has reign in its budget. Their solution was to remove fuel subsidies. But impact leading to a price rise in fuel is crippling the economy.

Kanacki
 

For me my time in Ecuador was over 20 years ago. Although it seems like yesterday. strewth time flies. There are like many legends die hards that will chase the dream until they die out there. No facts to the contrary will ever shake them from their belief. Because its ceased to a treasure legend and become a religion.

That said I have no doubt many ancient ruined sites are still undiscovered and hidden caches from the long history of conquest and conflict are there for the finding.

And perhaps in some respects it the journey and not the destination that matters for many? A treasure in itself.

Kanacki
 

Hello E S Prince.

News information in regards of the legend or the state of Ecuador?

Kanacki
 

Seems Crow has better things to do than answer to my post . Or , maybe he don't has the details of the Bishop document , hence his post referred to him was a copy-paste article from " anecdotal research " of this site : Clues and maps to find Atahualpa's Incan Gold | The Expedition Consultancy Ltd

Some researchers believe how you need only a pair of boots and strong legs to find a treasure , but IMO these are not enough . The guys who made the maps for those treasures , used more brain than legs , and they were addressed to intellectual folks who use their brain too .
Bellow I post an aerial image ( not GE ) of the " Reclining woman " boulder ( red circle ) from the Captain Blake's map and the hill like a " Church porch " ( yellow triangle ) from Valverde's derrotero . Is nice to have in your collection pictures like these .

View attachment 1643969 View attachment 1643970

Have a nice weekend .

hi. I am interested to learn why you believe the photos relate to Blake’s map - please could you expand?
 

hi. I am interested to learn why you believe the photos relate to Blake’s map - please could you expand?

When a landmark fits with a clue from a map, this means the map is accurate. And more weight to the accuracy gives the fact how this landmark is at the same location with other clues from another document or another map.
 

Gold hunters may be closing in on two lost Spanish mines in the Ecuadorian jungle

Feb 6, 2020 | CuencaHighLife | Views: 117
By Jim Wyss

Stefan Ansermet was deep in Ecuador’s tangled southeastern jungles, a hard two-day hike from the nearest village, when he stumbled into a clearing. The change in vegetation was so subtle that everyone else on his team tromped straight through, unaware, but Ansermet was intrigued.


Stefan Ansermet, left, a consulting geologist for Aurania Resources, and Faustino Tsenkush, an exploration geologist, stand beside large man-made blocks on what they believe is an old Spanish road leading to lost gold mines in southeastern Ecuador. (Aurania Resources)
Over the next four days in mid-November, Ansermet, a geologist and explorer, kept returning to the remote area, finding clues that confirmed his suspicions: The narrow clearing stretched a mile and a half and had been carved into the side of the mountain at points. There was a large, chiseled stone embedded in the trail.

“It took me a day to digest all the information and realize that this is not normal,” Ansermet said from his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. “It goes perfectly north-south and has been engineered for sure. In some places it’s absolutely straight for more than 100 meters. It’s a wonderful masterpiece of road engineering.”



But it’s where this road in the middle of nowhere might lead that has Ansermet and his colleagues excited.

For more than two decades, Ansermet’s boss, Keith Barron, has been searching for two Spanish conquest-era gold mines lost in Ecuador’s forests.

The two mines, Logroño de los Caballeros and Sevilla de Oro, were established around 1562 and abandoned 40 years later after a smallpox epidemic killed the indigenous workforce and the Spaniards came under prolonged attack from local tribes. At one point the conquistadors who owned the mine appealed to the Spanish crown to send African slaves to keep the enterprises alive, but by that point the empire was bankrupt.

As the jungle reclaimed the area, the mines themselves were lost to history — last pinpointed on maps in about 1650.


Points out the contours of an old road in the jungle. (Aurania Resources)
Barron’s obsession with the South American mines began almost by chance.

A longtime exploration geologist from Toronto, Barron was studying Spanish in Quito, Ecuador, in 1998 and was being hosted by the family of a local historian, Octavio Latorre. Over dinner one evening, Latorre told his guest that there had been seven Spanish-era gold mines in Ecuador. One was never lost, four of them had been “rediscovered,” but two remained missing.

Latorre — an expert on colonial-era maps of the Amazon who died in 2017 — had been contracted by Ecuador’s government to pore over historical documents and find clues to the missing mines.

The government had good reason to locate them before others did. The last “rediscovery” of a Spanish-era mine had been a disaster.

In 1981, two boys hunting in southern Ecuador stumbled on the vestiges of the Nambija mine that had been “lost” in 1603. As word spread, the area was quickly overrun by more than 25,000 wildcat miners, sparking a humanitarian and environmental crisis. In 1993, a portion of the illegal mining camp collapsed during an earthquake, killing about 300 people.

By the time Barron met Latorre, the government had called off the search for Logroño de los Caballeros and Sevilla de Oro. But the story inspired Barron to start a gold company in 2001 and begin looking for the lost camps.


Keith Barron, the CEO and chairman of Aurania Resources, stands on a trail in southeastern Ecuador. Barron has spent more than two decades searching for two lost Spanish mines. (Aurania Resources)
Good fortune, however, got in the way of his quest. In 2006, Barron’s company, Aurelian Resources, discovered a massive gold deposit in southeastern Ecuador called Fruta del Norte. The find was significant enough that Canadian mining giant Kinross Gold acquired the company in 2008 for $1.2 billion Canadian dollars, or about $1 billion.

It was only after that sale that Barron began thinking about his next project and reconnected with his old friend Latorre. Over the ensuing years, Barron, Latorre and a team of archivists began a global search for documents that took them to Peru, Spain and Italy hunting for mentions of the mines.

On one trip to the Vatican, the men found a letter from 1628 written by a Carmelite priest who had lived in the New World for two decades and who provided a detailed description on how to get to Sevilla de Oro from the colonial town of Riobamba.

Using that letter as a road map, along with extensive geological research, Barron’s new company, Aurania Resources, applied for a mining concession in 2016 covering 208,000 hectares of land (about 514,000 acres) in southeastern Ecuador.

“We have been exploring the area for about three years now and we have found things on it that the conquistadors could have never dreamed of,” Barron said in a telephone interview. “We’ve found 20 interesting areas for gold and silver, and a number of porphyry copper deposits. … We have to work through those targets and see what we have.”

What they haven’t found are the gold mines themselves.

But that may have changed in November when Ansermet was tromping through the jungle looking for a place to carve out a helipad and stumbled on what appeared to be an old Spanish trail.

Ansermet, 55, spent days trying to follow the path. One side ended at a river; the other was blocked by a landslide.

But Ansermet and Barron believe the trail once connected the two mines.

“It’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s not connecting any local communities, it goes north-south, which corresponds to the relative positions of Caballeros and Sevilla de Oro,” Ansermet said, “and then there are all the other clues: blocks of rock and the engineering of the road.

“I think we really found the road — that’s my opinion,” he added. “If it’s not the road, then we’re talking about a new civilization.”

In late November, in a conference call with investors, Barron announced the discovery.

“This is not a tale of treasure island, this is something very real — people lived and died there and lots and lots of gold was produced,” he said. “It’s still back in the forest somewhere to be found and now we are very much hot on the trail.”

The announcement sent Aurania share prices on the Toronto Stock Exchange shooting up more than 40 percent, although they have since settled.

Working with archaeologists, the company has started a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) equipment survey of the areas at the ends of the road.

It’s too soon to tell if the trail truly is a path to lost gold and riches or simply another twist in Barron’s long quest for the lost cities.

“The road might just peter out and we find that there’s nothing at either end,” he said. Or the mines might lay outside the boundaries of Aurania’s concession. “But we embarked on this journey for a reason.”

While Barron refers to the two mines as the company’s Lost Cities project, the sites were never more than crude camps.

“These were never cities, they were gold settlements, probably a maximum of 20 to 30 Spaniards living behind wooden palisades, and a number of indigenous people who remained to work the mines,” he said. “We are not going to find any buildings or anything of archaeological significance. We might find a trench or a rock dump.”

Ansermet, a self-taught geologist, has discovered 10 new mineral “species,” including the eponymous Ansermetite, a red crystal found in Utah, Italy and Switzerland that was accepted as a new mineral in 2002.

Growing up in Switzerland reading tales about South American explorers, Ansermet said that if he played a role — even an accidental one — in finding two lost cities, it would be the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition.

“What we’ve already accomplished is a sufficient dream for me,” he said. “But to maybe have found the remains of the last two cities — of El Dorados — for me it’s incredible.”
_________________
 

I investigated in Seville and Madrid the LLanganati affair. Following the clues of the book "Journey to the mysterious mountains of Llanganarti" of the Boschetti and Andrade expedition of 1933 and 1934. One of the things I was able to determine was that the famous "Derrotero de Valverde" undoubtedly ended up in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, but it either disappeared or was taken out of the original bundle and hidden in another one. From Antonio Pastor I found several documents, and indeed, Pastor was in Lambayeque, where I found customs documents. Finally, the Ecuadorian archaeologist Father Pedro Porras "revealed" and confirmed to me that the derrotero was seen in Seville and told me he knew who Valverde really was, but he could not divulge it because he knew it in secret of confession.
 

I investigated in Seville and Madrid the LLanganati affair. Following the clues of the book "Journey to the mysterious mountains of Llanganarti" of the Boschetti and Andrade expedition of 1933 and 1934. One of the things I was able to determine was that the famous "Derrotero de Valverde" undoubtedly ended up in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, but it either disappeared or was taken out of the original bundle and hidden in another one. From Antonio Pastor I found several documents, and indeed, Pastor was in Lambayeque, where I found customs documents. Finally, the Ecuadorian archaeologist Father Pedro Porras "revealed" and confirmed to me that the derrotero was seen in Seville and told me he knew who Valverde really was, but he could not divulge it because he knew it in secret of confession.
Are you aware of this version of the derrotero?
Has some similar clues with the Valverde's but is told like from a native's mouth.
I believe the " margasitas " hill was added to the derrotero after the Guzman's map.
Is good when you have to mix some versions in regards to take the " essence " of a possible real derrotero.

“Te pondrás en el pequeño pueblo de Píllaro suelo de nuestro gran Rumiñahui, allí preguntarás por el Moya que era de Rumiñahui, seguirás hacia las alturas frías hasta llegar a nuestro cerro del Guapa a cuya punta, si es que el día fuese de bueno, mirando siempre el lado de donde sale el solo sea el pueblo de Ambato que tendrás siempre a las espaldas y fijándote tus ojos verás siempre, al lado donde sale el sol, los tres cerritos que se llaman los Llanganatis que están en forma de tres, como el de callo el Tacunga, que dan las tolas en línea recta las del cerro Hermoso. Siguiendo este derrotero bajarás hasta llegar a la laguna verde que es la misma que se hizo a mano, ordenado por Rumiñahui, quien mandó a su hermano el cacique de Panzaleo se arroje allí todo el oro metal que quisieron los ambiciosos guiracochas para liberar a nuestro Padre Atahualpa con motivo de la orden que dio el guiracocha blanco. Seguirás, te digo, el cerro de Guapa, siempre con la montaña hasta que llegues al gran manchón de las grandes sangurimas que hacen de la confundir a los que anden por allí porque desvían del derrotero flechas.
Pues te diré que ese manchón es el guía que llevarás siempre hasta la mano izquierda hasta cuando llegues al juncal grande; desde el juncal grande, a media ladera pasarás por medio de él, donde verás dos lagrimitas que llamamos "laguna de los anteojos", por tener nariz al medio, una punta de arena semejante al Cuilcoche de Otavalos; desde este sitio volverás los ojos donde sale el sol y verás otra vez los Llanganates como lo viste otra vez desde el alto del gran Guapa y te prevengo que no te engañes porque dichas lagunitas has de dejar siempre a tu izquierda y siguiendo siempre con mano izquierda de nariz o punta verás un gran llano de paja donde es dormida del segundo días donde se deja las bestias y seguirás con pie hasta llegar a la laguna negra llamada Yanayacu, la cual dejarás a la izquierda, bajando con mucho cuidado a la ladera, llegando a la quebrada, llegando a la gran Chorrera que es el golpe del agua o Chorrera del Golpe, donde pasarás por puente de tres palos. Y si éstos no halla ya, buscarás sitio poniendo otro puente donde verás la choza donde sirve de dormida, unida a la gran piedra donde están trazados los derroteros. Al otro día seguirás el viaje por el mismo derrumbe de la montaña, llegando a la quebrada cerca muy honda donde pondrás palos para poder pasar con mucho tiento, porque es muy honda.

Así llegarás a los pajonales donde braman los rayos del cielo, siguiendo los grandes llanos; y viendo que termina el gran llanete entrarás en una grande cañada entre los tres cerritos, donde toparás con camino empedrado del Inca y donde verás las puertas del socavón que está hecha como si fuera de iglesia; caminarás un buen trecho hasta topas con chorrera que sale de un hijo del cerro de Llanganates más grande haciendo tembladeras donde hay bastante oro que metiendo la mano sacarás otro granado. Pero para subir el cerro dejarás la tembladera y tomarás mano derecha por encima de chorrera, subiendo para dar vuelta el hijuelo y si acaso esta boca del hijuelo está tapada ha de ser con salvaje o musgo. Quita con las manos y darás con la puerta donde verás la guaira donde está horno para fundir metal. Si quieres regresar procura coger el río que queda a mano derecha, cogiendo playa para el hato siguiendo siempre el cañón del desagüe de la laguna; luego seguirás a mano derecha hasta cuando veas la nariz de las lagrimitas de anteojos y el gran Guapa que siempre deja atrás al pueblo de Ambato; seguirás cerro de mayordomo siguiendo pajonales fríos para bajar a Píllaro".
 

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In 1988 I spent some time in Quito for a mining project. I had the opportunity to meet an archaeologist and for this reason I frequented the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Antropologia e Historia. Talking with this archaeologist about the LLanganati treasure, he told me that they were dealing with a descendant of Eugene K. Brunner. It seems that Brunner found the original route. Undoubtedly Spruce was the one who altered the copy that Guzman had and that Spruce found among his documents.
On that occasion I had the opportunity to meet Oswaldo Garces, nephew of the archaeologist father Pedro Porras. Oswaldo went several times to Llanganati in numerous expeditions.
 

In addition, precisely in 1987-88 an Ecuadorian historian was working in the AGI of Seville and told me about a bundle whose title is something like: viajes y expediciones, which bundle was inventoried, but this bundle did not appear. Also, in an archive in Madrid, another bundle whose title is: proceso contra Valverde, also this bundle does not appear. The mystery continues!
 

IMO, Spruce altered Guzman's map by only marking on the map the places Guzman and father Longo died.
Actually the Guzman's map has some hidden codes in its drawings, and Spruce by comparing the landscapes in the map with those in the fields and making some research on the names written on it, was able to understand the concept of the map. After that, Spruce sent the two men who following his instructions, were able to find the treasure.
 

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