A 16th-Century Map Shows an Island Worth $22 Billion. It May Have Never Existed at All. 25%
By Elizabeth Rayne33%
7/31/2026, 6:00:00 AM
Keywords: Mexico, Island Worth, Bermeja, Gulf, Region, Existence, Ship, Cartographer, Oil Reserve, Expedition, United States, Mile, Map, Evidence, Government
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Negativity Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 12.9% saturation with 136 hits. Analysis detected 1,519 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,051 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.8% and a BS Rank of 25% (17,310 of 22,840 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 75.80% of the article peer group.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Back in the 16th century, a cartographer drew the island of Bermeja in the Gulf of Mexico.
Since then, numerous expeditions have tried and failed to prove its existence.Mexico wanted the island to exist because that would extend its border to include a region rich in oil reserves, which could be an immense boost to its economy.Despite no evidence being found for Bermuda’s existence, it remains a ghost that defines oil drilling boundaries.
In 1535, the rocky island of Bermeja appeared off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
The cartographer who painstakingly drew the Carta Universal of the Spanish Empire had never actually seen the island—he’d only been told that it belonged at the coordinates 22° 33 minutes north, 91° 22 minutes west, and that it covered about 50 miles (81 km).
For almost 500 years after he added it to his map, the island was thought to exist, as it was drawn and redrawn by cartographers.
Then, it vanished.
The belief that Isla Bermeja was a tangible piece of land remained so strong that it even kept appearing in Mexican textbooks.
In 1775, Captain Miguel Alguete led the Spanish Army in an expedition to find the island, and took meticulous notes in the ship’s log.
There was nothing obscuring the view, so if there really was land ahead, Alguete should have observed it.
Instead, he saw nothing but an expanse of water reaching out to the horizon.
Spain, and later Mexico, remained in denial, and the government of Mexico decided to settle the matter by sending out their own expedition in 1997.
Unlike the navigators and cartographers of the past, their team had the advantage of updated technology.
They still found nothing.
The coordinates for Bermeja do not lead to an island.
They instead take ships to a remote location in the Gulf of Mexico that’s surrounded by endless expanses of blue on every side.
In Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, islands have risen and sunk, but they have all left behind evidence of their existence.
Where Bermeja is supposed to be—or, at least, where it should have been—there’s nothing but empty water.
In a 2009 search (also launched by the Mexican government), experts in geography, limnology, and marine sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAP) set off on the research vessel Sierra to attempt once again to find evidence of the island.
Above the ship were aircraft to help survey the region.
On the Sierra, researchers used the newest high-tech equipment to search for the ghost island over a range of about 6,517 miles (10,488 km).
Every square meter of the ocean was documented, and the 933 photographs came back with a haunting conclusion.
The only thing seen by cameras was the empty seafloor, which betrayed no signs of a sunken island.
There were no geological features—no undersea mountains or volcanoes, not even a remnant—that suggested Bermeja had once existed.
And when the sediments at the bottom were analyzed for their age, they revealed that no formation of any kind had been at those coordinates for 5,300 years.
There was no island.
There might have never been.
If there ever was an island (or volcano or anything else) where Isla Bermeja was supposed to be, it was never recorded in writing, even by ancient seafarers who had passed it long ago.
So, why did Mexican authorities keep insisting that the island (whose name comes from its supposedly reddish hue) was there?
The legend might have started in Spain.
Back in the 16th century, spots denoting islands or other landforms would often be marked on maps to guide ships along trade routes.
But seafaring explorers also had an enormous political burden on their shoulders.
If they came back with no discoveries, they’d let down the Spanish government and therefore the entire country, but if they spotted so much as a swell or the back of a breaching whale, they could pass it off as an island and come home to glory instead of embarrassment.
More recently, after the 1997 expedition, Mexico was in negotiations with the U.S. over which economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico belonged to whom.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea dictated that an island in the vicinity of a nation could extend its border by 200 nautical miles.
Negotiations for the Treaty of the Western Gap—which would separate the regions belonging to the U.S. and Mexico in a part of the Gulf of Mexico known as the Western Gap—began in 1998.
These regions included the Hoyos de Dona, or “Donut Holes,” which were formed by sediment pushing up ancient salt deposits on the bottom.
They ended up trapping hydrocarbons that floated upwards, creating massive pressurized reservoirs of oil that would be an incredible boon for the Mexican economy.
“The establishment of a boundary is an important step for providing the necessary certainty for our deepwater offshore oil and gas program beyond the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone, particularly in light of the remarkable advances that have been made in deepwater drilling capabilities,” Walt Rosenbusch, director of the U.S.
Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service, said in a news release at the time.
“These new technologies have generated a high level of interest in the Gulf of Mexico deepwater region."
The oil in the debated region of the Gulf of Mexico was worth an estimated $22 billion.
Despite finding no actual scientific proof of Bermeja’s existence, Mexico signed the treaty insisting that an island had been on the record for centuries, afraid of losing access to the oil reserves.
Mexico was on the brink of privatizing its energy sector at the time, and therefore had a heightened interest in securing all available natural resources before foreign powers could close in.
Conceding that there was no Isla Bermeja would mean giving up the Hoyos de Dona and its black gold.
With the United States eager to disprove the island’s existence and claim the territory, Mexico launched a 2009 expedition to survey the area and defend its borders.
For Mexico, the only way to secure its financial future was to believe in a ghost—and put it on a map.
Analysis
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