An Island Listed Since 1540 Has Never Been Found
It was described as reddish and about 80 square kilometers, and kept appearing in official records into the 1900s.
Half as Interesting · The Missing Island Mexico Desperately Wants to Be RealAbout a hundred miles off Yucatan, in the Gulf, an island listed for centuries has never been found at its listed spot.
It is called Bermeja, a name that refers to a reddish hue observers reported. Spanish cartographer Alonso de Santa Cruz listed it in his 1540 Islario General, a catalog of the world's known islands, as reddish and about 80 square kilometers. Sailing records even noted trees, though no one seems to have ever landed and mapped it.
The record disagrees with itself. Bermeja stayed in official inventories and studies into the early 20th century, unlike errors copied from map to map, yet a 1775 Spanish survey came up empty in its search for it. Zooming into its listed coordinates today, where other islands appear sharply, brings up only a flat blue patch without detailed satellite pictures. No confirmed modern sighting exists.
Questions people ask
Why would Mexico care whether a tiny island exists?
Oil and fishing rights in the Gulf are the reason. Under United Nations rules, a habitable island gives a country an exclusive economic zone within 200 nautical miles of shore, where only that country can extract resources. At Bermeja's listed spot, that would push Mexico's zone about 55 nautical miles farther north, into water said to hold about 22.5 billion barrels of oil.
Has anyone actually gone to look for it?
In the early 2000s, around U.S.-Mexico negotiations over Gulf drilling, Mexico's Parliament sent an expedition and the National Autonomous University of Mexico conducted underwater sensing and aerial reconnaissance. The effort included satellite and sonar searching, and found nothing above or below the surface. Searchers found no sandbar, wreck, landslide, or seafloor shift to explain a vanished island.