The legend of the 7 Golden Cities of Cíbola — which may have originated on the Portuguese islands

No one knows for sure how the legend of Cíbola began. Some suggest that an 8th century Portuguese expedition found an island called Antília, also called “Ilha das Sete Cidades”. And for centuries, Spanish conquerors died (and killed) trying to find it.

It’s a story as old as time: legendary cities made of goldhidden deep in the jungles of the New World. The GoldenPaititi, the City of the Caesars — the name doesn’t matter.

There are many names and many variants of this narrative, but the search has always been the same. Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, many Portuguese explorers and Spanish conquerors died trying to find the immense wealth of one of these mythical places: the Seven Cities of Cíbola.

“It’s all just fantasy, a dream of that great desert…”, wrote the poet John Gould Fletcher when trying to get into the minds of the men who sought out Cíbola.

Nobody knows for sure how the legend of Cíbola began. Some sources suggest that a 8th century Portuguese expedition would have found an island called Antília, also referred to as the “Island of the Seven Cities”.

In this expedition, some Catholic bishops from Portugal or Spain, fleeing the Muslim conquest, sought refuge on an Atlantic island that, by chance, had huge gold reserves.

Most likely, the discoveries of atlantic islands like the Canaries, the Madeira, Cape Verde and the Azores have fed the myth of Antília. It is possible that Antília was a ghost island, a mirage seen in the distance at sea.

Still, its vague origins and lack of evidence haven’t stopped this imaginary island from appearing on maps. Charts placed it west of the Iberian Peninsula. How the island got from here to the New World remains a mystery.

According to , the Seven Cities of Cíbola, or simply Cíbola, were one of the versions of the myth of the City of Gold which circulated among conquerors and members of the clergy in the 15th and 16th centuries. After the conquest of the Aztecs and the wealth it brought, rumors of glittering cities began to dominate the world. spanish imaginary.

Supposedly, Cíbola was hidden in the deserts of the American Southwestmore specifically in the Sonoran desert. The Spanish recorded the names of five of seven cities: Matsaki, K’iakima, Hawikuh, K’ianawe and Halona. The other two were lost to history.

According to the writer George E. Bookerthe discovery of more advanced civilizations on the Yucatan Peninsula gave new breath to Cíbola’s narrative. It made the prospect of a city of gold more plausible.

Buker adds that the fascination with Cíbola probably inspired the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes to launch his own expedition in 1519.

At the moment, Cíbola is the name of a forest national territory located in New Mexico, ancestral territory of the Zuni people. In fact, there was some exploration of gold, copper and silver in the region, but this was not part of the legend.

Expeditions

A Narváez’s disastrous expeditionin 1527, set out to explore and colonize Florida with 600 men and several ships. Violent storms, famine, disease, and other misfortunes decimated the group.

At the end, only four survived: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza and a Moorish slave named Estevanico. They had separated from the main body of the expedition and wandered the desert for seven years, earning the respect of the indigenous people.

When the quartet returned to civilization in Mexico City, they relayed fantastic accounts of “large cities with streets lined with goldsmiths’ workshops…and entrances encrusted with emeralds and turquoise.” Other accounts from the time described “seven very large cities”, where people “ate from plates of gold and silver”.

These narratives led to a new expeditionpromoted by the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendozawho sent a small group, in which Estevancio and a Franciscan friar called Mark of Nice.

Marcos returned with the solemn news that hostile indigenous people had killed Estevancio, but not before he have found Cíbola.

These provocative reports further fueled the viceroy’s greed for the gold, and led him to launch another attempt to find Cíbola. He sent his friend the explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronadosupposedly with the mission of bringing the Gospel to the pagans.

Instead, the expedition looted everything it could find and devastated the local population. As for Cíbola, all they found were a few rather simple villages.

Desperate to locate these elusive cities of gold, they listened to a mysterious figure known as “the Turk”who entertained them with stories of another golden city, Quivira. It would be, it seemed, similar to Cíbola.

In the end, everything was nothing more than a fraudulent invention designed to exploit the credulity of the Spaniards and drag them into a futile chase. This would end up being the outcome of the attempts to find these cities.

The original myth of Antilia It was probably born from the combination of mirages and Catholic refugees who were looking for delegitimize Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula. When it was stated that the bishops had arrived at an island of gold, the divine favor from which they would benefit.

As optical illusions were the origin of dozens of legends about imaginary lands during this Age of Discoveries. Many sailors dreamed of finding a new land where their wildest desires would come true.

Mirages marked not only the exploration of the New World in the 16th century, but also, prominently, later voyages to the Arctic — although without the gold component.

It is possible that Cíbola was nothing more than an invention created by indigenous groups in the region, in the hope of alienating the most gullible Spaniards from their communities and push them into the desert.

And maybe this was one of many silent but effective weaponsused by indigenous peoples with few resources in confrontation with Europeans.