Tales of Glitter or Dust.

• Author: Buck, Daniel
• Position: Treasure of Sacambaya, Bolivia

AGE-OLD STORIES OF JESUIT GOLD BURIED AT SACAMBAYA, BOLIVIA, SPARKED THE IMAGINATIONS OF TREASURE HUNTERS AS LATE AS THE 1960S

Mark Twain was commenting on human nature, not geology, when he said that a gold mine is a hole in the ground alongside which stands a liar. Tales of legendary riches seem to gravitate to auriferous mines, open or closed. A case in point is the fabled lost Jesuit gold treasure at Sacambaya, in Bolivia's eastern Andes. Folktales and supposed colonial documents have fed the Sacambaya legend since the 1800s, but no one has found the treasure.

The only person to have ever profited from the Sacambaya gold was a wily gentleman named Saavedra, who persuaded Bolivian dictator Mariano Melgarejo that he knew the location of the gold. Melgarejo, who ruled from 1864 until his overthrow in 1871, was a corrupt tyrant nicknamed the "scourge of God" by his enemies. He was not a man to be trifled with, let alone cheated. One historian marveled that Saavedra "must have been a great liar." Stimulated by Saavedra's treasure tale, Melgarejo provided him with eight thousand pesos and a squad of soldiers to dig up the gold. A day after arriving in Sacambaya, near Cochabamba, Saavedra disappeared--along with the eight thousand pesos. Another version has "a half regiment of soldiers," led by Melgarejo himself, marching off to Sacambaya, where the locals refused to divulge the treasure's location. Whether these stories were true or not, Bolivian interest in the treasure faded. By the early 1900s, Sacambaya had become a distinctly English passion.

The first Englishman to take up the challenge was Cecil Herbert Prodgers. A man who carried 265 pounds on his six-foot flame and had a drooping walrus moustache, Prodgers had fought in the Boer War and raced horses in Peru before coming to Bolivia to recruit rubber tappers. While in Peru recuperating from his exertions in the rubber country, he was visited by Dona Corina San Roman, the daughter of a former Peruvian president. She possessed a document that had supposedly belonged to her grandfather, reputed to be a Jesuit himself, named Father San Roman, which "gave full particulars of a large treasure that had been hidden by the Jesuits." Dona Corina surmised that the indomitable Prodgers was "just the man to go look for it." Prodgers agreed with her assessment and undertook the quest. He would cover his own expenses and give her 10 percent of whatever he found.

The document Prodgers held in his hand as he made his way back to Bolivia said only that the treasure was in a cave on Caballo Cunco, a "steep hill all covered with dense forest ... from where you can see the River Sacambaya on three sides." On the flat crest of the hill would be "a large stone shaped like an egg," and underneath the stone would be the roof of a large cave "that took five hundred men two-and-one-half years to hollow out." Inside the cave, hidden in a maze of rooms, compartments, and hollows booby-trapped with "enough strong poison to kill a regiment," he would find $90,000 in silver money and sixty-seven "heaps of gold," not to mention many gold ornaments adorned with diamonds and other precious stones. The treasure's total value was said to be $60 million, the equivalent of about a billion dollars today. According to the document, more than half of the five hundred Indians who had labored to hollow out the cave had died of fever. Of the nine Jesuits involved in secreting the treasure, only two had survived: Father San Roman and Father Gregorio. (In other versions of the tale that surfaced later, Dona San Roman was the daughter of...