Los Jardines or Los Buenos Jardines (Spanish for "the good gardens") are

phantom island A phantom island is a purported island which was included on maps for a period of time, but was later found not to exist. They usually originate from the reports of early sailors exploring new regions, and are commonly the result of navigati ...

s supposedly located northeast of the

Mariana Islands The Mariana Islands ( ; ), also simply the Marianas, are a crescent-shaped archipelago comprising the summits of fifteen longitudinally oriented, mostly dormant volcanic mountains in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, between the 12th and 21st pa ...

. The islands were reportedly visited by Spanish explorers

Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón Álvaro de Saavedra (d. 1529), fully Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón, was one of the Spanish Empire, Spanish Spanish explorers, explorers of the Pacific Ocean. Life Early life The exact date and place of his birth are unknown, but he was born in the l ...

(who named them Los Buenos Jardines) in 1528 and

Ruy López de Villalobos Ruy López de Villalobos (; – 23 April 1546) was a Spanish explorer who led a failed attempt to colonize the Philippines in 1544, attempting to assert Spanish control there under the terms of the treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza. U ...

(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 John Marshall (September 24, 1755July 6, 1835) was an American statesman, jurist, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the fourth chief justice of the United States from 1801 until his death in 1835. He remai ...

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 as well as real islands such as

Wake Wake or The Wake may refer to: Culture *Wake (ceremony), a ritual which takes place during some funeral ceremonies *Wakes week, an English holiday tradition * Parish Wake, another name of the Welsh ', the fairs held on the local parish's patron s ...

and

Marcus Island sometimes Minami-Tori-shima or Minami-Torishima, 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 ...

s. In 1973, the

International Hydrographic Organization The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) (French: ''Organisation Hydrographique Internationale'') is an intergovernmental organization representing hydrography. the IHO comprised 102 member states. A principal aim of the IHO is to ...

removed them from its charts.

References

Phantom islands Islands of the Pacific Ocean 1528 in the Spanish Empire {{Oceania-geo-stub