The Fawcett Expedition

The true story of a journey into the heart of Brazil, in search of a lost city and its great treasures, The Fawcett Expedition tells the adventures of Percy Fawcett, a British explorer whose whereabouts ― after disappearing in Serra do Roncador (MT) ― are still unknown.

Between 1906 and 1924, the famous British explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett made several forays into the Amazon to map the territory and its borders with the support of the Royal Geographical Society. From the Bolivian Amazon rainforest to the Bahian caatinga, he explored the local fauna, flora, and archaeology, meeting indigenous peoples of the most diverse ethnicities. Until 1925, he set off with his eldest son, Jack Fawcett, and a friend of his, Raleigh Rimmell, on his most daring mission: the search for the ruins of a lost city, the base of a complex civilization teeming with gold and riches, which he called Z, the Brazilian Eldorado.

Convinced of their existence by an 18th-century manuscript found in Brazil, the trio of English explorers arrived in Cuiabá and entered the dense and still relatively unexplored territory of the Serra do Roncador, on the border between the Cerrado and the Amazon rainforest. Three months after the expedition began, in May 1925, Percy Fawcett sent his last letter to his wife, reassuring her: "You need not fear any failure." After that, he and his expedition disappeared forever, and all subsequent attempts to discover their whereabouts were futile. Colonel Fawcett's life and the mystery of what happened to him have inspired many stories since then, the most famous of which is the Indiana Jones film series.

Bringing together letters, diaries and accounts from ten years of the explorer's travels through dangerous forests and rivers, encounters with hostile and friendly peoples, bad weather, diseases and wild animals, The Fawcett Expedition , organized by Brian Fawcett, the colonel's youngest son, tells of an era of risky expeditions, discoveries about nature and encounters with the native peoples of South America, from the perspective of a prominent naturalist of his time, who left behind one of the greatest enigmas of the 20th century.