The El Dorado Expeditions

1965: Pajaten-El Dorado I revives the five-hundred-year-old tradition of searching for El Dorado, but the object of this expedition is not to find gold. Gene Savoy uncovers the Chachapoyan ceremonial center of Gran Pajaten, the bird city of the upper jungle, and concludes from his reading of the Spanish chroniclers that the Chachapoyas people had played a vital role in the last days of the Inca.

1966: El Dorado I, Phase 2 & El Dorado II find evidence of the high civilization of the Chachapoyas and prove that these "cloud people" had at one time inhabited the lower jungles. El Dorado II finds the first genuine links with Gran Pajaten --thirteen different sites of important ruins-- all within the territory occupied by the Chachapoyas Kingdom. Gene Savoy realizes that the Chachapoyas region is the gateway to El Dorado, a vast jungle empire in the green world of Antisuyo.

1967: El Dorado III seeks and locates the lost cities of El Dorado (mentioned in the 16th century chronicles of Pedro Cieza de Leon) --twelve major ancient cities of the Chachapoyas Kingdom which Gene Savoy names the Twelve Cities of the Condors.

1968: El Dorado IV, V & VI return to the Cities of the Condors and, for the first time, film a lost city being cut out of the jungle. During El Dorado VI, which is committed to a CBS production on the uncharted Lake of the Condors, Gene Savoy discovers a new road leading off into the jungle interior...

1969: El Dorado VII probes the highlands of Amazonas and northeastern Peru in search of the fortress city of Rabantu, the last great capital of the Chachapoyas, and brings to light five previously unreported cities. By the end of the El Dorado Expeditions (which have uncovered forty cities and temples on the forested slopes of the eastern Andes), Gene Savoy believes he has located six of the seven lost Chachapoyan cities conquered by Inca Tupac. He also believes he has shown that man was present in the greater Amazon basin for millennia. What contact the great Peruvian cultures had with Mesoamerica still remains to be seen...