The lidar mapping revealed not one but two large settlements, one of which was the size of the core of Copán. In May 2012, press releases issued by a team led by documentary film maker Steve Elkins and by the Honduran government about remote sensing exploration using LiDAR renewed interest in the legend. His book about the search, Jungleland, was published in 2013. In 2009, author Christopher Stewart attempted to retrace the steps of Theodore Morde in 1940 with the help of archaeologist Christopher Begley. Interest in Ciudad Blanca grew in the 1990s as numerous explorers searched for it and news of archeological work in the area was chronicled in popular media. (See Timeline below for a list of the many attempts to identify the White City.) He said it was called the White City because its buildings and a wall around it were white stone. In his report on the Pech people of Honduras to the Society of Americanists, he said the ruins had been found about twenty-five years earlier by someone looking for rubber who got lost in the area between the Paulaya River and the Plátano River.

The first known mention by an academic of the ruins under the name Ciudad Blanca (White City) was by Eduard Conzemius, an ethnographer from Luxembourg, in 1927. In 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh reported seeing a 'white city' while flying over eastern Honduras. Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés reported hearing 'trustworthy' information on a region with 'towns and villages' of extreme wealth in Honduras, but never located them. They point out that there are multiple large archaeological sites in the region and that references to the legendary White City cannot be proven to refer to any single place. Due to the many variants of the story in the region, most professional archaeologists doubt that it refers to any one actual settlement, much less one representing a city of the Pre-Columbian era. Archaeologists refer to it as being a part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area of the Americas, one in which the predominant indigenous languages have included those in the Chibchan and Misumalpan families. This extensive area of rainforest, which includes the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, has long been the subject of multidisciplinary research. It is also known by the Pech name Kahã Kamasa ('White Town'). La Ciudad Blanca ( pronounced, Spanish for ' The White City') is a legendary settlement said to be located in the Mosquitia region of the Gracias a Dios Department in eastern Honduras. ( January 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. This article possibly contains original research.

City of the monkey god