Pedro Escalante is one of the few people who can truthfully say that they have found a lost city in the jungles of Central America. Now a well-known Salvadoran writer, Escalante was a 25-year-old law student in 1970 when local farmers told him about a group of odd square mounds in the hills of central El Salvador. Escalante and a few other Salvadorans had been searching for the country’s first capital, which was built by Spanish colonists in 1528, abandoned after less than 20 years, and then all but forgotten. In 1545, the Spaniards moved the capital of what was then the province of San Salvador to a new location about two days’ journey on foot to the southwest, where it remains to this day. Colonialera descriptions of the original settlement were sketchy and gave little insight into its location. “Take me there,” Escalante told the farmers.
“As soon as I saw it, I was quite certain this was la ciudad vieja, the old city,” Escalante says of the day he hiked through cornfields and forests and came upon ruined stone walls and—just as the farmers had said—overgrown mounds shaped like city blocks. The mounds had corners with sharp right angles and what seemed to be long, straight streets running between them. In the center of this cluster of earthen cubes, Escalante found the remains of the town square, just like the open space at the center of every Spanish colonial settlement.
Escalante’s discovery was confirmed by aerial photography and ground surveys, but by the late 1970s El Salvador was descending into a civil war that would force half a million rural people to flee their homes, including the farmers who had led Escalante to the site. Ciudad Vieja came close to being forgotten once again by the time a peace agreement was signed in 1992 and some residents began returning home.
In 1996, Salvadoran and U.S. archaeologists finally began an excavation of Ciudad Vieja, which would goish material culture in the Americas. Archaeological discoveries at the site have tended to confirm colonial accounts indicating that the town had a tiny Spanish population along with a sizable Indigenous majority living uneasily under their colonial overlords. “Nothing was ever built on top of the site, so it has all the evidence preserved in one place,” says archaeologist William Fowler of Vanderbilt University, who has worked there since excavations began and believes it is the most pristine colonial-era town in Latin America. “It’s the entire town, with the remains of all its economic activities including textile production, pottery, and agriculture. It’s all right there.”
