(dramatic music)
- 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 billions 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
to 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?
(dramatic music)
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.
(warriors shouting)
- 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.
And at the center of this empire was the gleaming white city
of Tenochtitlan, modern Mexico City.
(tense music)
This was a time when the Aztec Empire stretched
as far as present-day Honduras and Guatemala.
- [Laurence] Like any conqueror, Montezuma plunders treasure
from the lands he captures.
(warriors shouting)
- He was looting from these other states
all kinds of treasures, gold bars and masks,
turquoise, jade, other precious stones.
And they kept them there at Tenochtitlan.
(intense music)
- [Laurence] 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 the sense as they're digesting their power
and turning it into a gift for us,
a gift of beauty, a gift of great 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 the billions.
(intense music)
- [Laurence] 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 The Bahamas,
the Spaniards established colonies
throughout the Western Hemisphere.
- In the 20 years or so after the establishment
of Spanish colonies,
the Spaniards were interested in finding gold,
but there was very little of it in the Caribbean.
But at the same time,
the Spaniards begin to hear stories from the mainland
of untold riches just over the horizon.
(intense music)
- 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 started 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 landfall at what 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 are going forward with me to conquer the Aztec Empire."
- [Laurence] Nine months later, they arrived
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 had been to Constantinople,
some to Paris,
and yet we'd never seen anything as fabulous as this."
(intense music)
- 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 to Tenochtitlan.
And Cortes was also a bearded Spanish conquistador.
(suspenseful music)
- 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 notice a fresh wall
in the palace, freshly bricked up.
And so, their curiosity piqued,
break down that wall and find a hidden room of treasure.
Treasure, the conquistadors intuit,
that Montezuma did not want them to see.
(tense music)
- [Laurence] 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.
(foreboding music)
- Cortes was essentially giving Montezuma orders.
- We now have descriptions of the Spaniards
forcing the Aztec smiths to take the 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 ingots 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.
(crowd shouting)
- [Laurence] 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 with the Spanish.
And they feel that their king is a puppet,
and they kill him.
(intense music) (crowd shouting)
The Spanish then retreat inside of the palace.
There's about 500 conquistadors that are there.
- So they are outnumbered by tens and tens of thousands
of Aztec warriors.
- Hernan Cortes and other Spaniards now realize,
they gotta go.
This is not tenable anymore for them to be in Tenochtitlan.
(tense music)
- 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.
- [Laurence] Getting all that gold out of Tenochtitlan
will be no easy feat.
(tense music)
- The Aztec capital of 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 of Lake Texcoco.
- It's a maze of canals and causeways.
So, they basically have to get boats.
Some people are gonna swim next to the boats.
It's a very complex process of getting out,
a very dangerous one.
(suspenseful music)
Nightfall comes, and they begin their escape.
Now, the escape is going well,
but then they're spotted.
- [Laurence] 50,000 Aztecs descend
upon Cortes's 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 Cortes and about 50 conquistadors
and indigenous allies made it out alive.
- [Laurence] 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.
(intense music)
- [Laurence] A discovery more than 450 years later
adds weight to the theory that Montezuma's treasure
was lost in battle, sunk in the Aztec canals.
- In 1981, 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.
(equipment whirring)
- What it ends up being is a nearly 23 karat gold bar,
11 inches long, 2 inches wide.
- [Laurence] The story makes headlines around the world.
Archeologists say the location matches up
to one of Tenochtitlan's ancient canals.
And one of Cortes's 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's 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.
- [Laurence] Then, nearly 40 years later,
new technology may tell even more of the story.
- 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
that 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.
- [Laurence] Experts believe it's likely the gold bar
is part of Montezuma's treasure.
(suspenseful music)
But if so, where's the rest of it?
- Finding that one gold bar in that one spot
implied that there must've been a chaotic situation
in which the gold was basically spread out
all over what would've 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 City.
- But we're dealing with 500 years worth of construction
on top of what was initially
an ancient city,
in an island, in the middle of a lake.
Who knows what remains to be found?
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] 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 canals,
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 take Tenochtitlan.
(intense music) (warriors shouting)
(weapons clanking)
- 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 Aztec.
(tense music)
- During a nearly three-month siege
during which Cortes is able to cut off the causeways,
isolating Tenochtitlan,
the Aztecs finally give up.
And when Cortes and his Tlaxcalan allies march
into the city, they are ruthless.
(ominous music)
- The Aztec Empire,
which had existed for over a hundred years,
is over.
- [Laurence] 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 a, basically, 20% tax on all the treasure they found.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] After coming to the New World,
Spain takes unprecedented quantities of gold
from 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've 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 Gulf of Mexico
for gathering all of the Aztec treasure
and then sending it back to Spain
in massive fleets of ships.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] Much of the gold shipped from Mexico to Spain
left from the port of Veracruz.
Could Montezuma's treasure have taken the same route?
(suspenseful music)
- Even though we know that most Aztec gold was melted down
into bars, some artifacts did make it back to Spain.
- The great painter Albrecht Durer describes in one
of his diary entries, seeing treasures coming
from Montezuma's world as sent by Cortes.
He describes a great, circular, silver object
as well as a golden sun that is now being shown
to the royal families of Europe.
- [Laurence] 450 years later, fisherman Raul Hurtado
is working near Veracruz
when he makes an astonishing discovery.
- [Raul] (speaking Spanish)
- It's a small gold ingot,
which Hurtado 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 more gold.
This time, he discovers
42 pre-Columbian items in the water,
which amounted to about 15 pounds of gold,
which would've been about $300,000 in today's money.
- [Laurence] Raul's discovery becomes known as
"Las 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.
- [Laurence] But if so,
how might the fisherman's gold have ended up in the water?
(intense music) (waves crashing)
- 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've sunk or some of it would've fallen off the boats.
It's not likely that every single piece
of gold would've made it from Mexico back to Spain.
- [Laurence] Today, these ingots
and the rest of The Fisherman'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.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] While some historians believe
Cortes 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 Cortes and the Spanish were coming
for one thing, gold.
So there is a scenario in which Montezuma decided,
"I need to get this gold out of Tenochtitlan."
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] 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 indigenous family,
about gold that was stashed by the Aztecs
in a temple in Guatemala called Tikal.
(tense music)
- The local legend is that Montezuma ordered the gold
to be stashed there after the Spanish showed up.
- And it's not crazy to think that Montezuma would've sent
some of the gold that he had south to what's now Guatemala,
because he must've understood on some level
that Hernan Cortes was dangerous.
- [Laurence] Intrigued with the story,
Carmichael convinces the father and son
to guide him 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 ruins at the time of the Aztecs.
So Tikal itself had very steep, high pyramids,
but the jungle had taken over this entire city.
It was completely deserted.
- When they arrive in front of the temple,
they realized, oh my gosh, this temple was sealed shut.
Perhaps intentionally sealed so shut,
they would've 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.
- [Laurence] Before Carmichael can arrange
another expedition, he gets transferred overseas.
- Carmichael basically accepts that he's just gonna have
to let this one go.
- So he returns to England, he gets busy with life.
- [Laurence] But more than 20 years later,
a chance discovery inspires him
to pick up the search once more.
(mysterious music)
- 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 some local kind of legends.
- He says that he happens upon an account
from a priest that says that Aztec gold was stashed
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 that gold.
(tense music)
- [Laurence] In 1903, Carmichael embarks
on his second expedition.
- Well, 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 guides,
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 guides that were taking him
had no choice but to bury his body on the side of a road.
- [Laurence] Carmichael may be gone,
but that's not the end of his quest.
- And then some years go by and in 1926,
a British archeologist 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.
(mysterious music)
- After 500 years,
the quest for Montezuma's lost treasure has turned up
some 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 we've been told?
Could it be that no one's found Montezuma's lost treasure
because everyone's looking in the wrong place?
(tense music)
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.
(suspenseful music)
- 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 Tenochtitlan 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.
- [Laurence] 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.
- [Laurence] Is it possible that after the Spanish
invaded Mexico searching for gold,
Montezuma II enacted a similar plan?
- It's a story that has been passed down orally
from generation to generation.
- The 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.
- [Laurence] After the long journey,
a legend says the Aztecs supposedly placed the treasure
in a cave.
(mysterious music)
- 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 treasure 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.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] 500 years later,
a story 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.
- [Laurence] In 1902,
Johnson is alone in the Arizona desert
when he breaks his leg.
- And he's then nursed back to health
by a Paiute named Rabbit Tail,
and his wife helps him recover from his broken leg.
- And in the process of healing, Rabbit Tail
and Johnson would get into conversations over a fire,
and Rabbit Tail tells him this story about gold
that 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
and begs Rabbit Tail to take him and show him.
Rabbit Tail says no initially, that it was a secret,
and he would not reveal it to him.
- [Laurence] Then, as the story goes,
Johnson gets his opportunity.
(intense music)
- While Jake Johnson is recuperating,
a mountain lion comes into their camp
and is about to attack Rabbit Tail's wife.
(gun cocks)
Johnson has a rifle with him.
(suspenseful music) (mountain lion growls)
(gun firing)
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 Paiutes.
- So he gives him 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.
- [Laurence] But as for the location of this treasure cave,
it remains a mystery.
(tense music)
- [Laurence] For well over a hundred 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've 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.
- [Laurence] 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 Cortes.
Supposedly, some of which even describe how Cortes tortured
some of the priests of Tenochtitlan
after he retook the city,
asking them where the treasure was.
- [Laurence] 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, he feels like he recognizes this map.
- The landscape draws Crystal's attention.
- Freddy Crystal recognizes a mountain range on these maps
as a mountain range near Kanab, Utah,
which is where he's from.
- Crystal is convinced that this map is going to lead him
to treasure, a treasure that has a connection
that goes all the way back to Cortes and Montezuma.
(suspenseful music)
(tense music)
- 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.
(tense music)
Freddy goes inside, and what does he find?
- And there, behind that little wall is a tunnel
into the mountain.
- [Laurence] 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.
(pickaxes clanking)
- They find some chambers.
They find some other kind of clues.
- They find, in the caves, 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.
(dramatic music)
- 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.
(intense music)
- [Laurence] 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've 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.
(suspenseful music)
- As the story goes, in the Palace of Axayacatl
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.
- [Laurence] Cortes and his men likely raided that room
just before escaping on The Night of Sorrows.
- 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 in multiple locations?
And how much of the gold was hidden?
How much of the gold may have been left behind?
(tense music)
- [Laurence] Is it possible the Aztecs hid the treasure
in another part of the palace before 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,
Cortes and his man began a process of dismantling it.
All of this progress, all of this technology,
all of this human achievement brought down to rubble.
They begin erecting new structures.
They begin to drain the lake.
And thus, begins a process that leads us from Tenochtitlan
to present-day Mexico City.
- [Laurence] But then, in 2017, a stunning discovery.
- In 2017, construction on the Nacional Monte de Piedad,
a historic pawn shop in Mexico City,
reveals, 10 feet down, a basalt floor 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.
- [Laurence] Maybe even a courtyard
from the Palace of Axayacatl.
As the archeologists continued 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.
- [Laurence] Archeologists 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 Axayacatl.
(dramatic music)
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 the treasures
that have been lost.
But the truth is, there's no hard evidence
that this is where it was all stored.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] Could there still be
an underground vault nearby filled with treasure
Cortes and his men didn't take?
(suspenseful music)
- 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 huge buildings around it,
they're not gonna be tearing that up to find
some hidden 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 city,
but we have to go back through an entire change
in the historical context of the world.
(mysterious music)
- 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 Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries".
(dramatic music)