Cocos Island, a speck of jungle four hundred miles off Costa Rica, has drawn treasure hunters for over a century on the strength of rumors that pirate loot, including the fabled riches of Lima, lies buried somewhere in its ravines. This film follows the strangest of them: August Gissler, a German adventurer who arrived in the 1880s convinced he could find it, and stayed for seventeen years. Using archival material, maps, and location filming on the island itself, the documentary traces Gissler's digging, his dealings with the Costa Rican government that eventually made him the island's unofficial governor, and the slow toll the obsession took as decades passed with no treasure found. Historians and researchers walk through the evidence for and against the treasure's existence, and the film treats Gissler less as a fool than as a case study in how a single unproven story can consume a life. It ends with the island still undug in most of its acreage, and the legend intact.