Case file · Folklore / legend
Fawcett's 'lost world' on the Huanchaca plateau
Surveying the Rio Verde on the Bolivia–Brazil border in 1908, Percy Fawcett saw the sheer sandstone walls of the Huanchaca tableland (Serra Ricardo Franco on the Brazilian side) and imagined prehistoric animals surviving on its isolated top.
1908 CE · -14.10, -60.75 · status: account
The account
Fawcett showed photographs of the hills in London, and Arthur Conan Doyle attended his Royal Geographical Society talk in 1911; The Lost World appeared in 1912. Fawcett himself wrote that Doyle already had the idea for a South American novel. The plateau is now inside Bolivia's Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.
The sceptical view
Roraima in Venezuela is the other usual candidate for Doyle's plateau, and Doyle probably drew on both. No relict fauna has ever been found on either.