The surreal ancient rock fortress of Sigiriya.Credit: Getty Images
You might think that, in this increasingly tech-obsessed era of unsleeping smartphones, ever-watchful satellites and GPS navigation, there’s nothing of our world left to discover.
And yet, as recently as October, news emerged that a sizable Mayan metropolis, unknown to contemporary historians, had been located in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche.
Long enveloped by the branches and creepers of the jungle, a relic that has since been christened “Valeriana” was “hiding in plain sight”, a mere 15-minute hike from a main road and 100 kilometres from Calakmul, a ruin of similar heritage.
What was unusual was that the city was discovered not by grizzled explorers, slashing a trail through foliage, but with lasers, a Google search and an academic thesis.
Ultimately, the finding was the work of Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in New Orleans, who chanced upon an unheralded Mexican environmental survey in a quiet corner of the web – and was able to unravel its data into something that had been missed.
This is all a far cry, of course, from those aforementioned grizzled explorers of yore – soldiers and sailors, wanderers and wayfarers, whose journeys in the (mainly) 18th, 19th and 20th centuries uncovered many of the archaeological wonders we hold so dear today.
Whether their discoveries were ever truly lost, not least to local knowledge, there is something about those treasure-hunters and the marvels they unearthed that still thrills here in the 21st century.
While many “lost cities” are no longer lost, there can be joy in finding them for yourself, including the following 20 UNESCO World Heritage-listed sites ranging from South American rainforests to Arabian sand dunes.
Machu Picchu, Peru
The historical hall of fame tends to posit Hiram Bingham as the hero who located Peru’s foremost Inca site, 350 or so years after it dropped out of view.
In fact, the American was almost certainly beaten to the punch – by nine years – by the Peruvian explorer Agustin Lizarraga; Bingham even acknowledged the local man’s 1902 achievement in his early writings about his own visit in 1911 (only to later downplay Lizarraga’s role).
It is the American’s name tagged to the luxury Belmond train service that carries more well-to-do travellers to Machu Picchu from the old Inca capital Cusco – but, in truth, the “who” and “what” of its rediscovery is just a footnote in the citadel’s wider story.
There was no written language in Inca life, and with this, there is little primary evidence as to its purpose. Archaeological analysis suggests it may have been a royal estate built about 1450, and abandoned a century later. But its air of mystery is part of its charm.
See it Belmond’s seven-night Highlights of Peru tour from $13,310 a person; or consider Contours Travel’s eight-day Classic Machu Picchu tour from $3298 a person. See belmond.com; contourstravel.com.au
Ingapirca, Ecuador
The Inca city in Ecuador called Ingapirca, meaning “Inca’s wall”.Credit: Getty Images
The Inca empire was not confined to the mountains of Peru. It spread its tentacles north, into what is now Ecuador, though not always with complete success.
Andean warriors the Incas may have been, but they never quite quelled the Canari, the indigenous people who haunted the mountains north of the “border”. Ingapirca, pitched near the modern city of Cuenca, was one of the key fruits of an uneasy stalemate – both Inca and Canari are in its foundations and its population.
Its timeline is similar to Machu Picchu’s. The main buildings rose in the late 15th century and the collapse came quite quickly, in about 1530.
Windswept and somewhat remote, the site first fell under European eyes via French geographer Charles Marie de la Condamine and his mission to map the Amazon region (1735-1744). It retains plenty of its mystique, the Temple of the Sun crowning its hilltop.
See it Journey Latin America visits the above ruins on the 11-day Self-Drive Ecuador, from $5574 a person, flights not included. See journeylatinamerica.com
Chichen Itza, Mexico
Chichen Itza now welcomes more than 2.5 million visitors a year.Credit: iStock
A scholar in Mayan history would surely argue that what is now Mexico’s most famous archaeological site was never exactly lost.
While Chichen Itza had slipped away from its zenith (between the 7th and 11th centuries) by the time the Spanish arrived on the Yucatan Peninsula, it was still a significant economic hub when the conquistadors marched into town. Francisco de Montejo and his soldiers burst into a living city in 1533.
It would take another three centuries before the citadel began to gain the profile that has transformed it into a bucket-list staple (it welcomes more than 2.5 million visitors a year).
The first seed of this flowering was perhaps planted by John Lloyd Stephens, an American diplomat whose 1843 memoir Incidents of Travel in Yucatan marvelled at the landmarks of the Mayan world. His sense of awe was well-founded. With the vast Temple of Kukulcan at its heart, Chichen Itza rarely disappoints the tourist.
See it Visit Chichen Itza on the 17-day Viva Mexico tour with Bunnik Tours, from $11,595 a person, with flights. See bunniktours.com.au
Amarna, Egypt
Inside one of the North Tombs in Amarna, Egypt.Credit: Adobe
Egyptology has given us a wealth of fascinating facts about Tutankhamun. One of them might come with the heading “Daddy issues”.
Akhenaten, the Boy King’s (probable) father, was an outlier in the royal line, an iconoclast whose reign was brief but exceedingly revolutionary. In 17 years on the throne (possibly 1351 to 1334 BC), he abolished Egypt’s traditional pantheon of gods and shifted his realm to the worship of a single deity (a sun god, Aten).
He also transferred the capital, from Thebes (modern-day Luxor) to Amarna, a city he had built in a previously empty location, about 450 kilometres north along the Nile.
None of this endured. Tutankhamun’s advisers reversed the religious changes, and the capital Akhenaten had crafted on the eastern riverbank was abandoned within two years of his death.
The ruin lay ignored, a place of folly and heresy, for three millennia; it was not mentioned in Western texts until French Jesuit Claude Sicard visited in 1714.
See it Via Scenic’s Essence of Egypt & Jordan itinerary, $21,995 a person, including a Nile cruise; not including international airfares. See scenic.com.au
Petra, Jordan
A cynic may suggest that it was not Swiss geographer Johann Burckhardt and his journeys at the beginning of the 19th century that brought the “Rose City” to a wider consciousness – but one Indiana Jones.
Certainly, Petra’s status as a global icon was boosted enormously by its deployment as a fictional resting place of the holy grail in The Last Crusade, the third instalment of Stephen Spielberg’s action-archaeology film series.
Another cynic may say that Jordan’s most famous site was an icon long before Harrison Ford turned up in 1989.
It has existed in its slender valley since at least the fourth century BC, and while it was the work of nomadic Nabateans, it has felt the footsteps of Romans, Byzantines and Mamluk Egyptians.
The Monastery or Ad Deir, Petra, Jordan.Credit: Getty Images
It never fully recovered from an earthquake in AD 363, and it lost its population over time, but it was rediscovered so enthusiastically in the 19th century that its rock-cut “Treasury” (Al-Khazneh) is wholly recognisable in the 21st.
See it G Adventure’s nine-day Amman to Dead Sea itinerary includes Petra. From $3644, not including flights. See gadventures.com
Ciudad Perdida, Colombia
Ciudad Perdida, ancient ruins in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Colombia.Credit: Alamy
So completely does this jungle-shrouded sliver of Colombian yesteryear fit the concept of a “lost city” that its name is a direct translation.
The indigenous Kogi people of the Magdalena department, on the country’s Caribbean coast, call it “Teyuna” and they credit its existence to their forebears in the region, the Tairona.
Their argument that the ciudad was never Perdida, that they always knew of it, says a lot about how little the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the very north of Colombia, are known by outsiders.
In 1972, outsiders did come in the form of Los Sepulvedas; treasure “hunters” whose stumbling onto the site, and subsequent sale of gold artefacts on the black market, brought it to proper archaeological attention.
Steeply tiered on its hillside, the city bears a passing similarity to Machu Picchu but it is some 650 years older (founded circa AD 800).
See it Hike there on a Colombia Lost City Trekking group tour with G Adventures, from $1136 a person, not including flights. See gadventures.com
Pompeii, Italy
If the destruction of Pompeii was sudden and brutal – two choked days of eruption and ash in October, AD 79 – its rediscovery was a more gradual process. Vesuvius hit its mark so effectively that all signs of the ancient city had vanished come the medieval era.
Architect Domenico Fontana stumbled across ancient buried treasure while doing preparation work for an aqueduct in 1592.
But it would take until 1748, 10 years after the construction of a palace for the king of Naples had found the remains of fellow volcanic victim Herculaneum, for proper excavation to begin. Spanish engineer Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre delved into the vacant ground where Pompeii was thought to lie.
Three centuries later, Pompeii’s resurrection is so successful that access has had to be partially limited. As of November 15, visitor numbers have been capped at 20,000 people per day.
But then, the popularity of the site is understandable; a fully formed Roman city frozen in time, its glory still clear in its bright murals and epic amphitheatre.
See it Martin Randall Travel offers both cities in its six-day Pompeii & Herculaneum – Antiquities of the Bay of Naples tour. From about $4900 a person, airfares not included. See martinrandall.com
Akrotiri, Greece
Ruins of prehistoric settlement, Santorini. Akrotiri lay in its tomb of ash for more than three millennia.Credit: Getty Images
Pompeii may be the most celebrated example of a city being devoured by volcanic fury, but it was far from the first. Sixteen or so centuries earlier, possibly in 1560 BC, the Minoan Eruption, one of the most powerful seismological events in human history, disembowelled the Greek island of Thera.
It ripped it apart so completely that all that remains is the shattered upper ridges of its caldera, a close association with the legend of Atlantis and a steep-cliffed Aegean fragment now known as Santorini.
The eruption also took what had been a fishing port; one that had thrived as a stop on the trade routes between Cyprus and Crete.
Akrotiri lay in its tomb of ash for more than three millennia until a quarry coughed up artefacts, and French geologist Ferdinand Fouque unsealed the grave. It tells its tale persuasively at the south-west tip of the modern island.
See it Peter Sommer Travels offers an eight- and 13-day Cruising the Cyclades itineraries onboard a traditional gulet that takes in Akrotiri. From $7870 a person, not including flights. See petersommer.com
Troy, Turkey
Ruins of the ancient city of Troy in Canakkale Province, Turkey.Credit: Getty Images
Whether its demise bore much resemblance to the narrative laid down in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad (and the movie retelling with Brad Pitt as Achilles), Troy has long haunted the imagination as one of antiquity’s great lost locations.
It was something of an obsession for Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman who, with the help of Anglo-Turkish archaeologist Frank Calvert, finally identified the purported home of Priam, Paris and the absconded Helen, near Tevfikiye, in north-western Turkey, in 1870.
Though their methods were heavy-handed by modern excavation standards, the pair unearthed a place of remarkable historical depth. It probably existed as early as 3600 BC; it was fortified by 3000 BC; and it may (though it may well not) have been burned down in the Trojan War, perhaps between 1194 and 1184 BC.
Whatever the truth of that old yarn, Troy lived. Its remains are divided into nine distinct layers, each denoting a different era.
See it On The Go Tours has a four-day Gallipoli & Troy group itinerary, from $1945 a person, airfares not included. See onthegotours.com
Angkor, Cambodia
Ta Prohm is the modern name of the temple at Angkor, Siem Reap, Cambodia.Credit: Getty Images
Cambodia’s astonishing jungle relic is another “lost city” that perhaps was never really lost. After all, no matter how dense the treescape, it is hard to lose a place that, sprawling across some 1010 square kilometres, was probably the biggest pre-industrial city on the planet.
At its height, it was a seat of unbounded power and the focal point of the Khmer Empire, which dominated what are now Thailand and Laos, as well as Cambodia, from the ninth to the 15th centuries. Angkor rose within this period, founded in AD 889.
Its foremost structure arrived some two centuries later. Angkor Wat pushes up through the canopy as a Hindu temple of astonishing scope and scale, its towers reflected in surrounding lakes.
Various factors – ongoing war, the coming of Buddhism as a supplanting religion – led to its fall, and Angkor was probably abandoned by 1431. It remains perhaps the most shining example of a metropolis swallowed by foliage and time.
While a Portuguese friar, Antonio da Madalena, is thought to have been the first European to glimpse the ruins, the use of another of its temples, Ta Prohm, in the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Angelina Jolie hacking her way through the tropical undergrowth) rather sealed the deal.
See it Via the 15-day Kingdom of Adventure itinerary offered by Inside Asia Tours. From $5860 a person. See insideasiatours.com
Mesa Verde, US
The Cliff Palace is the largest ancient Puebloan ruin in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Credit: iStock
The popular history of the US does not tend to peer back too far before European colonisation but this remarkable cluster of native American dwellings, in the far south-west corner of Colorado, pre-dates the Plymouth Pilgrims by a couple of millennia.
The first rudimentary abodes were dug into the sandstone of the Colorado plateau in about 1000 BC. The “Cliff Palace” that has become the site’s postcard moment is a little more recent, having been carved out by the Anasazi people in about AD 1200.
But it has the look and feel of a distant yesteryear, its homes burrowed into a hollow which protected its inhabitants from summer sun and winter snow.
Archaeological analysis suggests the city was abandoned at the end of the 13th century, and it remained all but unknown until photographer William Jackson passed through the area in 1874. His images began a process: national park status (nps.gov/meve) was conferred in 1906.
See it Via Trafalgar’s Welcome to Colorado 10-day tour. From $5895 a person, not including airfares. See trafalgar.
Karakorum, Mongolia
Karakorum’s ancient city wall.Credit: Adobe
Karakorum’s power era was brief, but it left its mark on the history of Mongolia. Reputedly founded by Genghis Khan in 1220, on a site where he had rallied his troops for battle with the Khwarazmian Empire (modern-day Iran and Afghanistan), the city was quickly built up by the warlord’s successor, Ogedei Khan.
It served as the capital of the Mongol Empire between 1235 and 1260, revolving around the ornate Palace of Myriad Peace, where a sculpted silver tree stood as a symbol of prosperity.
Alas, when Kublai Khan moved the capital to Xanadu in 1260, Karakorum had had its day. Its decline was sealed by the invading troops of China’s Ming dynasty, who razed what was left in 1380.
The city was lost until Russian archaeologist Nikolai Yadrintsev travelled to Mongolia in 1889 and identified Genghis Khan’s one-time home.
See it Via Intrepid’s 15-day Wild Mongolia tour, from $4496 a person, international flights not included. See intrepidtravel.com
Sigiriya, Sri Lanka
The origin myth of this lofty citadel, at the heart of Sri Lanka, may be just that – a myth. But it is an epic tale: of Kashyapa I, an illegitimate son of King Dhatusena, who killed his father and displaced the rightful heir Moggallana, and built a lofty fortress wherein to protect himself from his half-brother’s revenge, only to die in the climactic battle that ensued.
Whatever the truth is, Sigiriya has the look of a widescreen epic. Crafted between AD 477 and 495 (if the timeline of Kashyapa’s reign is to be believed), it sits atop a 180-metre volcanic plug, with commanding views of the surrounding plains.
The structures on the summit suggest a palace as much as a fortress, as do the ornate water gardens at ground level. The elaborate frescoes on the rock’s flanks, meanwhile, speak of its later purpose, as a Buddhist monastery, which endured into the 14th century.
British Army officer Jonathan Forbes encountered the “brushwood-covered summit of the rock of Sigiri” in 1831. A century and a half later, another set of Britons, the pop group Duran Duran, would film the video for their 1982 single Save A Prayer upon Sigiriya’s broad summit.
See it Take the 15-day Sri Lanka Unveiled tour offered by APT. From $8795 a person, not including flights. See aptouring.com
Memphis, Egypt
Step Pyramid, Sakkara, Egypt, contains a necropolis for the ancient Egyptian capital, Memphis. Credit: Getty Images
Egypt is so littered with ancient cities that it can be forgiven for losing track of one or two of them. Memphis certainly slipped into shadow.
Hugely important in its strategic position at the mouth of the Nile delta, it grew to be one of the capitals of the ancient kingdom, reaching its apex in the middle of the third millennium BC (2613-2494 BC).
But it declined in importance when the royal court moved to Thebes in about 2040 BC. Egypt’s eventual shift to Christianity also punctured its religious purpose, although traces of the Great Temple of Ptah, which was dedicated to the city’s protector-deity, remain.
When Arab chronicler Abd al-Latif visited it in the 13th century, he encountered ruins that “still offer to the eye of the beholder a mass of marvels that bewilder the senses, and which the most skillful pens must fail to describe”.
See it Intrepid Travel’s 12-day Egypt Experience can include Memphis as an add-on. From $3396 a person, not including flights or the add-on. See intrepidtravel.com
Carthage, Tunisia
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Few cities fell as ferociously as the broken stones that decorate the north coast of what is now Tunisia. Carthage was one of the great capitals of the ancient world; the heartbeat of the Punic Empire in the first millennium BC.
But the fight it picked with Rome was its undoing. While the city would recover after its razing by the troops of Scipio Aemilianus in 146 BC, it would never again be a Mediterranean superpower.
Reborn several times, its fortifications were ultimately torn down by its own guardian, Hafsid ruler Muhammad I al-Mustansir, just after it had been lost to (and regained from) Crusader forces, in 1270.
The site was never forgotten, but it was eclipsed by its successor Tunis (16 kilometres to the west). First excavated by Danish archaeologist Christian Tuxen Falbe in 1830, it is a place that wears its scars openly.
See it Visit Carthage on the 12-day Discover Tunisia group tour with Wild Frontiers, from $6995 a person, airfares not included. See wildfrontiers.com
Ubar, Oman
The ancient city of Ubar, Shisr, in Dhofar region, Oman.Credit: Adobe
Unlike the rest of the “lost cities” in this article, there is a good deal of ongoing debate as to whether this possibly mythical fragment of the Arabian landscape has actually been found. Plenty of explorers have set out to uncover the “Atlantis of the Sands”; an ancient citadel supposedly destroyed by divine wrath, which lies buried somewhere under the dunes in the vast expanse of the Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter.
Tradition has given it the name “Ubar”; 20th century attempts to locate it tied the legend to Shisr – a small archaeological site – in the remote south-west of Oman, which extends to little more than the remains of a fort and a well.
Noted figures such as Nicholas Clapp and Ranulph Fiennes have cast their gaze over the ruins; the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger may have been the first European to visit Shisr (in 1946). The historical jury is still out.
See it Wild Frontiers offers a 12-day Oman Desert Adventure that ticks off “Ubar”. From $7585 a person, flights extra. See wildfrontiers.com
Vijayanagara, India
A watchtower over the zenana, or women’s quarters, in the ruins of the 14th-century city of Vijayanagara. Credit: John Gollings
The history of India is a complicated weaving of many threads, but one of the most striking sections of the tapestry is the ghost that haunts the central section of the modern state of Karnataka.
Vijayanagara was a brightly burning phoenix, the kingpin of the medieval empire of the same name, which rose from ruins and warfare to encompass the south of the sub-continent between 1336 and 1646.
Its capital was a place of learning and religious tolerance; an economic boom-town whose lakes and fruit gardens promised a better life.
Alas, while its name translated as “City of Victory”, it became a symbol of defeat; the conquest and looting of the capital in 1565 sent the empire into a slow but inescapable death spiral.
At the start of the 19th century, Colin Mackenzie – a Scottish soldier who would become the first Surveyor General of India – drew up maps of Hampi, the ancient complex of monuments and temples from which Vijayanagara had risen. The whole area is a UNESCO site, as of 1986.
See it Hampi features in the 16-day Basix tour, South India Revealed, with Intrepid. From $1420 a person, not including flights. See intrepid.com
Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe
The walled citadel of Great Zimbabwe emerged in the 11th century.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The European eye did not notice when this walled African citadel emerged in the south-eastern hills of what is now Zimbabwe roughly a millennium ago. Built by the ancestors of the modern country’s Shona people, Great Zimbabwe began to take shape in the 11th century. It was partly a royal palace, partly a well-connected hub in the continental trade in gold and ivory. Items found in its ruins include Arabian coins and pottery shards from China and Persia. At its peak, it may have been home to a population of 18,000. The exhaustion of its nearby gold mines saw its abandonment in around 1450.
This emptying out occurred early enough that the city was a shell when Europe’s powers became aware of it. Various Portuguese soldiers noted its existence in the 16th century, but the moment of publicity is credited to Adam Renders, a German-American hunter whose “discovery” drew the German geographer Karl Mauch to the site in 1871.
See it Via the 14-day Classic Zimbabwe Self-Drive tour from Far And Wide Travel. From $11,625 a person. See farandwide.travel
L’Anse aux Meadows, Canada
Ancient homes of Viking settlers in L’Anse aux Meadows.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The idea of Christopher Columbus as the first European to lay eyes on the “New World” is rather torpedoed by the Vikings who crossed the Atlantic five centuries prior. Pinned to the north tip of (the Canadian island of) Newfoundland, L’Anse aux Meadows is thought to have been settled between 1014 and 1021.
It could have been a mould-breaker, a herald of new eras. As it was, it was probably little more than an outpost of 150 people; a dock for boat repairs, allowing Norse sailors (from Greenland) to further their journeys in a vast, unknown place. Evidence suggests that it was only in use for 20 years and was abandoned voluntarily, without bloodshed. There are no graves – or signs of struggle.
For all this, it is a crucial piece of the past. It was excavated by Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad from 1960 to 1968, their trowels probing a set of mounds that Newfoundland locals knew as “the old Indian camp”. Unesco status arrived in 1978.
See it Via the 12-day Scenic Wonders of Newfoundland and Labrador with Trafalgar.. From S7050 a person, excluding flights. See trafalgar.com
Caracol, Belize
Caracol is thought to have been founded as early as 1200 BC.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The image of an unshaven archaeologist striding through the jungle in a battered hat does not apply to this piece of the Mayan jigsaw puzzle, which sits in the far west of what is now Belize. It was not an Indiana Jones-type who found the site, but a local woman, Rosa Mai – who tripped over its remains while searching for mahogany trees for logging.
What she had unwittingly discovered had been an important part of the Mayan ecosystem – once subservient to neighbouring Tikal (over the border in what is now Guatemala), but later a power in its own right. Perhaps founded as early as 1200 BC, Caracol had shed its population by AD 1050. But it had grown extensively in the interim, spreading to 200 square kilometres – larger than what is now the biggest urban area in the country, Belize City.
See it Caracol is a stop on the 13-day Best of Guatamala and Belize tour with Eclipse Travel. From $5801 a person, not including flights. See eclipsetravel.com.au
This story is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in The Telegraph, London