The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

by David Grann

It was also Canarana’s twenty-fifth anniversary, and the city was celebrating with fireworks, which sounded like sporadic gunshots. In the early 1980s, the Brazilian government, as part of its continuing colonization of Indian territories, had sent in planes filled with cowboys—many of German descent—to settle the remote area. Though the town was desolate, the main roads were bafflingly wide, as if they were superhighways. Only when I saw a photograph of a guest parking his airplane in front of a local hotel did I understand the reason: for years, the city had been so inaccessible that the streets doubled as runways. Even today, I was told, it was possible for a plane to land in the middle of the road, and in the main square sat a passenger airplane, the town’s only apparent monument.