Qualla: Cueva de los Tayos

Cueva de los Tayos: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MezzoforteF, CC BY-SA 3.0. Every spring the Shuar people slip into the mouth of Cueva de los Tayos on vine ladders, carrying bamboo torches, to harvest fledgling oilbirds from the ledges where the adults nest. They have done this for centuries. The cave took its name from those birds - tayos in the local Spanish, guacharos elsewhere - and for most of its history that was the cave's entire story. Then in the 1970s a Hungarian-Argentine adventurer named Juan Moricz told anyone who would listen that deep inside the cave, beyond tunnels carved by non-human hands, rested a library of golden books. The cave has not been the same since.

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Image: MezzoforteF | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cueva de los Tayos: Geography of the Deep

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit calliopejen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cave sits on the eastern slopes of the Andes in Morona-Santiago province, where the mountains fold into the western edge of the Amazon rainforest. Its principal entrance opens at roughly 800 meters elevation within a dry valley floor, the shaft dropping 65 meters straight dow...

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Image: calliopejen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cueva de los Tayos: Moricz and the Metal Library

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Osocnort1960, CC BY-SA 4.0. Juan Moricz arrived in Ecuador convinced that the ancient Magyars - his own people, he believed - had once sailed to the Americas. In 1969 he claimed to have entered Cueva de los Tayos and found the Metal Library: shelves of yellow metal, stone sculptures, a polished stone desk, ...

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Image: Osocnort1960 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cueva de los Tayos: Von Daniken and the Astronaut

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MezzoforteF, CC BY-SA 3.0. Erich von Daniken, whose 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? had seeded a global industry of ancient-astronaut speculation, seized on Moricz's claims for his 1973 follow-up The Gold of the Gods, describing mounds of treasure and alien-engineered tunnels. The publicity drew a Scottish...

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Image: MezzoforteF | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cueva de los Tayos: Competing Accounts

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MezzoforteF, CC BY-SA 3.0. Other witnesses gave their own versions. Captain Petronio Jaramillo Abarca said a Shuar friend had led him into the library as a child - shelves of yellow metal, hundreds of books that resembled geometry textbooks, and, for some reason, a nine-foot-tall golden skeleton in a cryst...

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Image: MezzoforteF | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cueva de los Tayos: The Cave That Remains

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MezzoforteF, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2018 Expedition Unknown dragged the legend back to television when host Josh Gates and Stan Hall's daughter Eileen descended into the cave with Shuar guides. They found no library. What they and every other serious expedition found was a beautiful, scientifically interesting c...

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Image: MezzoforteF | CC BY-SA 3.0