The city nobody found

Somewhere between the mountains and the lakes of Patagonia, there was supposed to be a city. It had streets of silver and towers of gold, and the people who lived there never grew old. Nobody has ever found it.

The story probably started with survivors of a shipwreck who walked inland and were never seen again. Somebody imagined they had built a city. Over the years the story grew: the city moved, it appeared in fog, it disappeared when someone got close.

Expeditions left again and again for three hundred years. Some were paid for by governments. Men crossed rivers in winter and slept in the snow. They came back with nothing, and the next group left a few years later.

What those expeditions did do was draw maps. Looking for a city that was not there, they described valleys, passes and lakes that nobody had written down before. The city never existed, but Patagonia got mapped because of it.