In Quest of El Dorado

In 1922, British writer Stephen Graham set out to walk 3,000 miles across South America, following the blood-soaked trails the Spanish conquistadores had carved through the jungle two centuries before. From Columbus's first landing to the godless rampages of Cortez, Pizarro, and Balboa, Graham physically retraces their routes, standing where empires fell and civilizations were erased. He finds a landscape haunted by its past: crumbling monasteries built on destroyed temples, mining towns still digging for gold the conquistadores died seeking, indigenous people living in the shadow of cathedrals erected over their ancestors' bones. This is travel writing with an unsparing eye, refusing to glorify the conquest while capturing the raw, dangerous beauty of a continent still marked by violence. Graham's pilgrimage through the ruins of empire asks a question we're still grappling with: what do we owe to the places history has broken?