Original subtitles

Tonight, an Aztec king's glittering treasure, its whereabouts, unknown.

Montezuma had this big treasure.

Some of the most valuable jewels.

Gold, silver.

The value of that is almost immeasurable. It must be in the hundreds

of dollars.

It's inspired a 500 -year search that spans continents.

Spanish explorers started searching for it, and were really willing to do

anything to get to it.

Now, we uncover the top theories behind a fortune that vanished into thin air.

Someone's got it. Someone's hiding it. And he believes that that map is a map

show where Montezuma's hidden gold is contained.

And even today, treasure hunters are looking for this lost pyramid with this

gold treasure inside it.

What really happened to Montezuma's lost treasure, and where is it today?

November 1519, Tenochtitlan.

Aztec King Montezuma has spent 16 years building the strongest nation in

Mesoamerica.

Montezuma II is the ninth Aztec emperor.

He was a great warrior. He was very much respected.

His military units had conquered large sections of Mesoamerica.

He was emperor when the Aztec empire was at its cultural and geographic peak.

It was comprised of 500 city -states and close to 6 million people. people.

And at the center of this empire was the gleaming white city of Tenochtitlan,

modern Mexico City.

This was a time when the Aztec empire stretched as far as present -day

and Guatemala.

Like any conqueror, Montezuma plunders treasure from the land he captures.

He was looting from these other states all kinds of treasures, gold bars and

mats, turquoise, jade, other precious stones.

And they kept them there at Tenochtitlan.

In the Aztec world, nothing is valued like gold.

Among Aztecs, gold was seen as almost a divine item. It had a connection to

divinity. In fact, it was essentially called the excrement of the gods.

This means this is what comes from the gods, and in a sense they're digesting

their power and turning it into a gift for us, a gift of beauty, a gift of

color, a gift associated with the sun.

We don't know exactly how much wealth, how much treasure, how much gold

Montezuma had. We know it was there, it was represented in people's clothing, it

was represented in the art.

Estimations are a guess, but do go as high as a billion.

But just as Montezuma reaches the height of his power, a threat appears at the

edge of his empire.

After 1492, following the landing by Christopher Columbus in what is today

Bahamas, the Spaniards established colonies throughout the Western

In the 20 years or so after the establishment of Spanish colonies,

were interested in finding gold, but there was very little of it in the

Caribbean.

But at the same time, Spaniards begin to hear stories from the mainland of

untold riches just over the horizon.

Gold is such a rare commodity in Europe. It is extremely valuable.

So it makes sense that as soon as Columbus and other Spanish explorers

to discover that this existed in what they called the New World, they started

searching for it and were really willing to do anything to get to it.

And they start to send expeditionary trips into the east coast of what's now

Mexico, trying to contact this empire.

And that's where Hernan Cortes enters the story.

Cortes had been an administrator on Cuba for seven years.

And he had heard stories of the great Aztec empire and the great city of

Tenochtitlan and the great treasure that they had.

In February of 1519, Cortes set sail from Cuba with over 500 men, 100

sailors, and 11 ships straight for the Yucatan Peninsula.

He makes his way around the peninsula and eventually makes the landfall at

becomes the important port of Veracruz. They landed, and then Cortes burned the

ships, and he told his men.

You're not going back to Cuba. You're going forward with me to conquer the

Empire.

Nine months later, they arrive into the Aztec capital.

Imagine the scene. The Spaniards are coming into Tenochtitlan.

They are so overwhelmed by the size, the beauty, the organization, the wealth,

that later Hernan Cortes writes about this city and he says, some of us have

been to Constantinople, some to Paris.

and that we've never seen anything as fabulous as this.

So Cortes shows up at Tenochtitlan, and Montezuma welcomes him. He's glad to see

Cortes and the conquistadors, and he thinks that they are returning gods.

The Aztecs had a prophecy of a god named Quetzalcoatl, and Quetzalcoatl was a

bearded man, and he was to come on a certain year, and that was...

By coincidence, the exact same year that Cortes was marching on Tenochtitlan.

And Cortes was also a bearded Spanish conquistador.

Unbelievably, Cortes marches right into Tenochtitlan.

Cortes and his men are allowed to stay on the royal palace grounds.

When Cortes and his men are given accommodations in the palace, they

a fresh wall in the palace, freshly bricked up. And so their curiosity

peaked. Break down that wall and find a hidden room of treasure.

Treasure, the conquistadors intuit, that Montezuma did not want them to see.

With his eyes on the gold, Cortes takes Montezuma prisoner just days after

arriving.

Hernan Cortes orders his men to basically rush Montezuma.

They essentially put him under house arrest.

And this endures for seven months, where Montezuma is effectively a puppet

emperor.

Cortes was essentially giving Montezuma orders.

We now have descriptions of the Spaniards forcing the Aztec smiths to

gold and to smelt it down.

The Spanish are just interested in the gold. They don't care if it's a bracelet

or a mask.

They just want the gold. And so they begin to melt it down into bars and

with the intent of sending back to Spain.

The Spanish have a huge amount of gold, not just the gold that they've gotten

from the treasure room, but all of the gold that they have accumulated from the

point where they landed in Veracruz.

By June of 1520, the Aztec people reach a breaking point.

One day, Montezuma is addressing the crowd, and they've now really had it

the Spanish. And they feel that their king is a puppet, and they kill him.

Spanish then retreat inside of the palace.

There's about 500 conquistadors that are there.

They are outnumbered by tens and tens of thousands of Aztec warriors.

Hernan Cortes and the other Spaniards now realize they got to go. This is not

tenable anymore for them to be in Tenochtitlan.

On June 30th, 1520, Cortes makes the faithful decision to flee Tenochtitlan.

Many historians estimate that Hernan Cortes and his men had gathered up to

eight. tons of gold.

So they had to figure out a way to get at least most of that gold out of

Tenochtitlan when they escaped.

So initially, Cortes gives direction to take a specific amount of treasure. But

then after that, he tells his men that they can take whatever else they can

carry. This is a seminal example of eyes being too big for your stomach.

Getting all that gold out of Tenochtitlan will be no easy feat.

The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was like a Venice of the Americas.

It was a city that was built on an island in the middle of this shallow

Lake Texcoco.

It's a maze of canals and causeways.

So they basically have to get boats. Some people are going to swim next to

boats. It's a very complex process of getting out a very dangerous one.

Nightfall comes, and they begin their escape.

Now, the escape is going well, but then they're spotted.

50 ,000 Aztecs descend upon Cortes' 500 conquistadors.

The Spanish remember what follows as the Night of Sorrows.

You have these conquistadors who are not light on their feet. They're weighed

down with gold, many of them falling into the water.

Ultimately, only Cortez and about 50 conquistadors and indigenous allies made

out alive.

Hundreds of lives are lost, and according to some, so is the gold.

So on the night of sorrows, many of the Spanish soldiers who died sunk to the

bottom of the waters of Tenochtitlan, along with the gold they were trying to

smuggle out.

A discovery more than 450 years later adds weight to the theory that

treasure was lost in battle, sunk in the Aztec canals.

In 1981, the president of Mexico, Miguel Lopez Portillo, ordered the building of

a new bank near the Alameda, the great park in downtown Mexico City.

The construction worker who's digging about 15 feet under the ground happens

upon a gold bar.

He is absolutely amazed by what he has found.

What it ends up being is a nearly 23 -carat gold bar.

11 inches long, 2 inches wide.

The story makes headlines around the world.

Archaeologists say the location matches up to one of Tenochtitlan's ancient

canal.

And one of Cortes' men may have also left a clue in his memoirs. The

shape and proportion of the bar match almost exactly to what one of Cortes'

lieutenants. described as the process by which they melted down, with the help

of the Aztecs, their gold, their masks, their jewelry, into these very

distinctive gold bars, 11 inches long, 2 inches wide.

Then, nearly 40 years later, new technology may tell even more of the

In 2020, this gold bar is subjected to fluorescent X -ray chemical analysis.

Based on the composition of the gold, as analyzed by the chemists, they know

that this is gold. It comes from central Mexico, and it was mined by the Aztecs.

They also were able to date the gold bar to 1519 -1520, exactly the time

Cortes was in Tenochtitlan.

Experts believe it's likely the gold bar is part of Montezuma's treasure.

But if so...

Finding that one gold bar in that one spot implied that there must have been a

chaotic situation in which the gold was basically spread out all over what would

have been Tenochtitlan.

People were sinking under the water. People were getting killed everywhere.

So the implication is that there may be more gold sitting under Mexico.

But we're dealing with 500 years worth of construction on top of what was...

Initially, an ancient city and an island in the middle of a lake.

Who knows what remains to be found?

June 30th, 1520.

In a bloody battle between the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadors in what's now

Mexico City...

Most of the Spanish soldiers are killed, and Montezuma's gold is supposedly

dropped in the city's canal.

But Hernan Cortes survives.

Cortes is eventually able to escape back to another city, Tlaxcala, where he

spends months rebuilding his army. And it's with this enlarged army, hundreds

more conquistadors, thousands more Mesoamerican allies, that he...

determines to return for the last time to Tenochtitlan.

When the Spaniards come into the Aztec capital, they're accompanied by over 20

,000 Tlaxcalan warriors.

Tlaxcala is a kingdom that the Aztecs have never been able to defeat.

And so they're the enemies of the Aztecs.

During nearly a three -month siege,

during which Cortes is able to cut off the causeways isolating Tenochtitlán,

Aztecs finally give up. And when Cortes and his Tlaxcalan allies march into the

city, they are ruthless.

The Aztec empire, which had existed for over a hundred years, is over.

Cortes is determined to take back any gold that wasn't lost.

during his previous escape.

But whatever gold Cortes does find, he can't keep all of it.

One -fifth of all gold and treasure that was taken by conquistadors was to go

back to Spain and to the king.

It was basically a 20 % tax on all the treasure they found.

After coming to the New World, Spain takes unprecedented quantities of gold

the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

It's thought that about 181 tons of gold was brought back to Spain,

and that the value of that would have been around $4 billion.

It made the king of Spain incredibly wealthy, and Spain at that time was the

most powerful country in Europe. They had tremendous amounts of money.

The Spanish established a series of ports in the Caribbean and along the

Mexico for gathering all of the Aztec treasure, then sending it back to

Spain in massive fleets of ships.

Much of the gold shipped from Mexico to Spain left from the port of Veracruz.

Could Montezuma's treasure have taken the same route?

Even though we know that most Aztec gold was melted down into bars, some

artifacts did make it back to Spain.

The great painter Albert Durer describes in one of his diary entries seeing

treasures coming from Montezuma's world sent by Cortes.

He describes a great circular silver object as well as a golden sun that is

being shown to the royal families of Europe.

450 years later, fisherman Raúl Hurtado is working near Veracruz when he makes

an astonishing discovery.

It's a small gold ingot, which Jartaro doesn't think too much of at this

particular moment in time. It's just a trinket.

But he at least has it in the back of his mind for a while that where there's

one piece of treasure, there might be more.

So about a year later, Raul Hurtado returns to the same spot looking for

gold. This time he discovers 42 pre -Columbian items in the water, which

amounted to about 15 pounds of gold, which would have been about $300 ,000 in

today's money.

Raul's discovery becomes known as La Joyas del Pescador, or the Fisherman's

Jewels.

Tellingly, Some of the items are stamped with a C, C for Carlos,

King Charles V, King of Spain, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

At the time, Cortes was in the New World.

Some of the gold was marked with Carlos V's stamp because he was owed a 20 % tax

on what was collected. So to make things easier and more clear -cut, simply mark

his portion with his name.

So a lot of people believe that this was a sign that this was Montezuma's gold

being returned to Spain.

But if so, how might the fisherman's gold have ended up in the water?

Well, if it was on a boat making its way to Spain, it's very likely that at

least a few of those boats would have sunk or some of it would have fallen off

the boat. It's not likely that every single piece of gold would have made it

from Mexico back to Spain.

Today, these ingots and the rest of the fishermen's jewels are exhibited in a

museum in Veracruz.

But is there proof that this gold was part of Montezuma's stolen treasure?

en route for Spain.

It's a great story, but what it would need is the type of verification we have

in other cases, where we have x -ray or chemical analysis, and that has yet to

be conducted.

So the mystery remains unsolved until that kind of testing is done.

While some historians believe... Cortez likely got the bulk of Montezuma's gold.

Others suspect that might not be true.

The Spanish records tell us that they took and plundered every piece of gold

they could find.

But one of the other theories about what happened to Montezuma's gold is quite

interesting. What if they stashed away the gold before the Spanish could

actually steal it?

They understood that Cortez and the Spanish were coming for one thing.

So there is a scenario in which Montezuma decided, I need to get this

of Tenochtitlan.

A man named John Carmichael believed that's exactly what happened.

The explorer's story was recorded in a 20th century American newspaper.

John Carmichael was a British officer who was working in British Honduras in

1868, which is today Belize.

So when he was there, he was told a story by a father and son, local

family, about gold that was stashed by the Aztecs in a temple in Guatemala

called Tikal.

The local legend is that Montezuma ordered the gold to be stashed there

the Spanish showed up.

And it's not crazy to think that Montezuma would have sent some of the

he had.

south to what's now Guatemala, because he must have understood on some level

that Hernan Cortes was dangerous.

Intrigued with the story, Carmichael convinces the father and son to guide

to the site.

It was an arduous three -day journey, but they finally arrived at Tikal.

Tikal is a fabulous Mayan city, but it was already ruined at the time of the

Aztecs. So Tikal itself...

had very steep high pyramids but the jungle had taken over this entire city

was completely deserted when they arrive in front of the temple they realize oh

my gosh this temple was sealed shut perhaps intentionally sealed so shut

would have needed modern equipment to break it open which they did not have so

they had to leave and return with that modern equipment to do it

Before Carmichael can arrange another expedition, he gets transferred

Carmichael basically accepts that he's just going to have to let this one go.

So he returns to England. He gets busy with life.

But more than 20 years later, a chance discovery inspires him to pick up the

search once more.

He gets an assignment in his job and returns to Mexico City.

And while he's there, he goes to a library, and he's just reading up on

local kind of legend.

He says that he happens upon an account from a priest that says that Aztec gold

was dashed at a temple in Tikal.

Almost a confirmation of what the father and son had told him 20 years earlier.

And that sets him off on another obsessive mission to go back and find

gold.

In 1903,

Carmichael embarks on his second expedition.

He tries to find the father and son unsuccessfully.

He has to rely on his old notes, but he's determined to find this temple.

And he makes his way back to Guatemala, back into the jungle to go back to the

temple in Tikal.

Carmichael leaves with his new guide, but they return several weeks later

without Carmichael and said that he died of malaria while they were trying to

find the temple.

And one story is that the guys that were taking him had no choice but to bury

his body on the side of a road.

Carmichael may be gone, but that's not the end of his quest.

And then some years go by, and in 1926, a British archaeologist named Thomas

Gann then takes up the quest again.

And he tries to follow Carmichael's expedition to find this pyramid with the

lost treasure in it, but he also fails.

That the Victorian explorers didn't find any gold in Guatemala doesn't prove

that it was never brought there. Could it have been there? Could it have been

moved? We don't know.

After 500 years, the quest for Montezuma's lost treasure has turned up

incredible finds, but hardly the entire hoard of gold rumored to exist.

Is that because there's more to the story of Spain's Aztec conquest than

been told?

Could it be that no one's found Montezuma's lost treasure because

looking in the wrong place?

When the Aztecs came to central Mexico and founded the capital city of

Tenochtitlan in 1325, it was the culmination of an epic journey.

The story goes about the Aztecs' origins are very murky.

The official tale made by the Aztecs is that they came from a place called

Aztlan.

Aztlan is the place of origin of the Aztec people.

The story being that a priest received in a dream a message from the deity who

told him, you need to move out of Aztlan and go south to find a new homeland.

You will finally see my image as a giant eagle on a cactus blooming

in the middle of a lake.

And that is to where your home should be.

The sign.

Happens to be on a small island in Lake Texcoco.

And that is where the legend of Tishnocheslan begins.

But the Aztecs continued to have a deep connection to Aztlan.

It's in their art, it's in the stories of their migration, and the written

codices.

But where was Aztlan?

Scholars believe the Aztec language may be a clue.

The language that the Aztecs speak is Nahuatl.

It is a similar language to the Paiutes and to the Zunis and the

Hopis. So here we have a linguistic link between the Aztecs

and tribes that are in northern Arizona and in southern Utah.

This suggests that Aztlan is somewhere in northern Mexico

or in the southwest United States.

Aztlan is something that the Aztecs were obsessed about. And that obsession

eventually led one of their emperors, Montezuma I, to send a large expedition

north to try to find it.

Is it possible that after the Spanish invaded Mexico searching for gold,

Montezuma II enacted a similar plan?

The story that is being passed down or leaked from generation to generation,

idea is that seven caravans were sent out from Tenochtitlan to the north.

And each of these caravans had a considerable amount of gold.

There is some evidence to suggest that the Aztecs did make it as far as present

-day Arizona.

We found some evidence in the form of cocoa beans.

in the form of a rubber ball that was used in an Aztec ball game that suggests

that maybe some may have made it that far north.

After the long journey, a legend says the Aztecs supposedly placed the

in a cave.

Half of the Aztecs stayed with the treasure while the other half returned.

to Tenochtitlan.

And the hope was that they would eventually go back north to the hidden

and bring it back to Tenochtitlan, but that wasn't to happen.

And therefore, the remaining people up in northern Arizona, they were just

integrated into the local population, and ultimately the treasures were

forgotten.

Five hundred years later.

A legend emerges of a prospector named Jake Johnson.

There really is only one written version of Jake Johnson's story, and that comes

from a miner's newspaper printed in 1903.

In 1902, Johnson is alone in the Arizona desert when he breaks his leg.

And he's then nursed back to health by a piute named Rabbit Tail, and his wife

helps him recover from his broken leg.

And in the process of healing, Rabbit Tail and Johnson will get into

conversations over a fire. And Rabbit Tail tells them this story about gold

made its way north by Aztecs and was there in Arizona.

But then comes the bombshell.

Rabbit Tail tells Johnson that the tribe still knows where the gold is.

And, of course, Johnson becomes extremely interested.

begs rabbit tail to take him and show him rabbit tail says no initially that

was a secret and he would not reveal it to him then as the story goes johnson

gets his opportunity while jake johnson is recuperating a mountain lion comes

into their camp and is about to attack rabbit tail's wife

johnson has a rifle with him

And he has essentially saved her life.

And Johnson, realizing how grateful Rabbit Tail is, asks him, can you please

show me where the gold is?

So Rabbit Tail agrees.

But he blindfolds Johnson so Johnson would not see where the gold was.

And so they enter this series of caves they climb through with their blindfolds

on.

They take him to a secret place, and then they take the blindfold off.

And he sees this fantastic gold treasure that is being kept in the cave by the

pirates.

So he gives them a couple minutes to gather as much gold as possible.

Johnson puts the blindfold back on, and they leave.

After Rabbit Tail is on his way, greed kicks in, and Johnson tries to relocate

the cave, but he never finds it.

Johnson is able to sell his gold for about $15 ,000.

It's the equivalent of about $450 ,000 today.

It's quite a treasure in 1902.

But as for the location of this treasure cave, it remains a mystery.

For well over 100 years, legends have persisted of Montezuma's gold being sent

thousands of miles north.

There are a lot of stories.

about how Montezuma's gold might have made its way to northern Mexico, to the

southern United States, states like Utah, California, or Arizona.

You can't necessarily ignore a story because it's a legend.

There's oftentimes a kernel of truth in the story if it's been passed down for

so many years between so many people.

One enduring tale involves an American prospector from Utah named Freddy

Crystal. In the early 1900s, Freddy Crystal was in Mexico, and there was a

monastery that was being demolished at the time.

Supposedly, Crystal is able to gain access to this ancient monastery, and he

finds old documents, documents dating back to the time of Cortez.

supposedly some of which even describe how Cortes tortured some of the priests

of Tichinoche's land after he retook the city, asking them where the treasure

was.

And then, according to the legend, he makes an even bigger discovery.

He finds a map that looks like the stump of a tree with branches hanging out of

it that contains petroglyphs. And to him, it looks like he recognizes this

The landscape draws Crystal's attention.

Freddy Crystal recognizes a mountain range on these maps has a mountain

range near Canab, Utah, which is where he's from.

Crystal is convinced that this map is going to lead him to treasure, a

that has a connection that goes all the way back to Cortez and Montezuma.

So he then goes up to Kanab, Utah, with his map, and he finds three caves that

are unusual.

And he thinks that these caves are the location of Montezuma's treasure.

So he gets some of the local townspeople to help him.

And they go into these caves, and they figure that the Aztecs have walled

up the treasure.

By creating piles of rocks and plaster.

And behind these walls will be the treasure.

They break it down.

Freddy goes inside.

And what does he find?

And there behind that little wall is a tunnel into the mountain.

Freddy thinks he's hit the jackpot.

Freddy Crystal and his friends, they're extremely excited.

They spend weeks tunneling and tearing down walls inside these tunnels.

They find some chambers. They find some other kind of clues.

They find, in the cave, chisel marks. They find some animal bones and things

like that.

But there's no treasure at all.

So after months of digging, after months of frustration,

Eventually, most of the town just gives up and returns home.

And eventually, Freddy Crystal decides that, well, he's going to give up his

quest for the lost treasure, and he leaves town, and he's never seen again.

But that Freddy Crystal never found any of the rumored treasure has had no

effect in terms of dissuading future treasure hunters.

Every year, every season, there is a new batch of treasure hunters. There are

returning treasure hunters who think that they have finally found the missing

piece that will ultimately lead them to Montezuma's missing treasure.

And they will probably continue for many years to come.

When Montezuma became king in 1502, The Aztecs had been ruling what's now

central Mexico for over 130 years.

We know that Montezuma enjoyed a lavish lifestyle that would have been the envy

of any monarch of Europe or sultan of the Middle East.

Montezuma was living large.

He had his own zoo, which had a plethora of birds. He had jaguars,

other kinds of wild animals.

As the story goes, in the palace of Axiakitol was Montezuma's treasure room,

where he stored all manner of jewels, gold, silver,

such that when the conquistadors said that they saw it, they were simply

dumbfounded.

Cortes and his men likely raided that room just before escaping on the night

sorrow.

There's really no way of knowing how much gold the Spanish got.

We know that they took some portion of it. Did the Aztecs hide caches of gold

multiple locations?

And how much of the gold was hidden?

How much of the gold may have been left behind?

Is it possible the Aztecs hid the treasure in another part of the palace

Cortes and the Spanish returned to conquer the city?

Uncovering the palace's remains to find the proof is a challenge.

After retaking the city, Cortez and his men begin a process of dismantling it.

All of this progress, all of this technology, all of this human

brought down to rubble.

They begin erecting new structures, they begin to drain the lake, and thus

begins a process that leads us from Tichinochitlan to present -day Mexico

But then, in 2017, a stunning discovery.

In 2017, construction on the Nacional Monte de Piedad, a historic pawn shop in

Mexico City, revealed 10 feet down.

a basalt floor that dated back to the time of Montezuma.

Experts looked at the pattern of the stones, and because of the way they were

laid, believe it was some kind of patio or outdoor space.

Maybe even a courtyard from the palace of Asayacatl.

As the archaeologists continue to dig, they uncover an adjacent room that may

provide a clue.

They find embedded in the corner of the room two large Aztec stones.

with carvings on them.

One of the stones depicted Quetzalcoatl, who was the serpent god and the creator

of the world and humanity.

And the other was a carving of a feather headdress.

Archaeologists confirm only a king's home would have such intricately carved

stones. Concluding, this courtyard and room were sections of the long -lost

palace of Ashiah.

The same palace Cortes and his men were brought to when they arrived in

Tenochtitlan. This may have been the same stone floor that Cortes and his men

would have walked across upon first meeting Montezuma.

The palace is where Cortes and his men lived, where Montezuma might have put

treasures that have been lost.

But the truth is, there's no hard evidence that this is where it was all

Could there still be an underground vault nearby, filled with Treasure

and his men, didn't say?

Is it possible that there is a room full of gold somewhere beneath Mexico

City today?

It's a fantastic thought, but...

If the treasure is still in downtown Mexico City, which has cathedrals and

buildings around it, they're not going to be tearing that up to find some

room full of gold.

To me, the most interesting part of the search for Montezuma's lost treasure is

that to find it, we have to not only peel back layers of cities, but we have

go back through an entire change in the historical context of the world.

After 500 years, the legends about what really happened to Montezuma's treasure

live on.

Did it disappear entirely after the Spanish conquest?

Or was it hidden somewhere from future threats, just waiting to be found?

I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.