Los Jardines or Los Buenos Jardines (Spanish for "the good gardens") are phantom islands supposedly located northeast of the Mariana Islands.
The islands were reportedly visited by Spanish explorers
Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón
Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón (often written as Álvaro de Saavedra) (d. 1529) was one of the Spanish explorers in the Pacific Ocean. The exact date and place of his birth are unknown, but he was born in the late 15th century or early 16th century in ...
(who named them Los Buenos Jardines) in 1528 and
Ruy López de Villalobos
Ruy López de Villalobos (; ca. 1500 – April 4, 1546) was a Spanish explorer who sailed the Pacific from Mexico to establish a permanent foothold for Spain in the East Indies, which was near the Line of Demarcation between Spain and Portugal a ...
(who called them Los Jardines) in 1542.''International Hydrographic Review, Volume 67.'' 1990. P. 165: ''"In 1529, Alvaro de Saavedra reported the discovery of two small islands about 375 miles northeast of the Mariana Islands. He gave to these the name ''Los Buenos Jardines''. ... About 14 years later, Villalobos reported sighting in the same general location a small group of islands he also called ''Los Jardines''. ... The location of these groups was between latitude 21° and 22° North and in longitude 153° East."'' Sighted again by John Marshall in 1788, they were purported to be part of an
Anson Archipelago
The Anson Archipelago was a designation for a widely scattered group of purported islands in the Western North Pacific Ocean between Japan and Hawaii. The group was supposed to include Wake Island and Marcus Island, as well as many phantom islands ...
, which included other phantom islands such as
Ganges Island Ganges Island, a phantom island known as in Japanese, appeared at on maps of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reports of its disappearance appeared in 1933.Wake and
Marcus Island
, also known as Marcus Island, is an isolated Japanese coral atoll in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, located some southeast of Tokyo and east of the closest Japanese island, South Iwo Jima of the Ogasawara Islands, and nearly on a straight l ...
s. In 1973, the
International Hydrographic Organization
The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is an intergovernmental organisation representing hydrography. , the IHO comprised 98 Member States.
A principal aim of the IHO is to ensure that the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters a ...
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