Fawcett Facts. Contains spoilers

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2017)

Trying to film an unsuccessful man's unsuccessful search for a city that did not exist is sure to cause problems. Early Spanish explorers from the 16th century onwards told of wide avenues, canals, palisades, cities of tens of thousands. Trouble was, when organised searches entered the land, everything was gone, and had disappeared into the jungle. So was it all hokum? Well no. There was never a city as Fawcett imagined, a Machu Picchu, made of stone. It was all earthworks, which after just two generations had been abandoned and returned to jungle. The Indians living there were all but wiped out by diseases brought by the first Spanish. They were not aware that their ancestors had built this remarkable system which only started to show up in the latest satellite imagery and was confirmed by on the ground digs in the past 20 years or so. Indian soil management techniques had reached a high level to transform human waste and leaves into rich compost enabling long term stay in villages. Fawcett was part adventurer, Indiana Jones, part David Attenborough, and part war hero, who was always skint. Rather than being a systematic geographer, he embarked on a poorly financed gung-ho expedition and vanished in 1925, being killed by Indians, without ever realising he had probably walked across part of the "city".Just how big this complex was, what language they used, how it was commissioned, we will never know, nothing was ever written down. Did it all link the Amazon from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps it did. What drove Fawcett ? Certainly the lure of gold; he was skint after all. And he was sure there was a city. But is it the "sure" of the gambler, who is sure he has the winning lottery ticket?