Is the Fountain of Youth Real? The Truth Behind Guy Ritchie’s Film

In Fountain of Youth, Guy Ritchie’s fast-past, wisecracking Indiana Jones homage, John Krasinski and Natalie Portman play siblings on a global hunt for the source of eternal life.

The clues first turn up inscribed in a 9^th-century Tibetan scroll and then — Da Vinci Code style — in the 1600s in masterpieces painted by Caravaggio, Rubens, Velázquez, El Greco and Rembrandt. To Charlotte (Portman), it’s all nonsense – at first – “snake-oil superjuice.” But Luke (Krasinski) is convinced the truth is out there. “Charlotte, you and I both know that there is a seed of truth cloaked in every myth, metaphor or fable,” he argues. Is he right? 

No myth has gripped the world for as long as that of eternal youth. Searching for immortality has been rich creative pickings for thousands of years, from Dracula and Peter Pan to the Holy Grail and the philosopher’s stone, and onward to modern times with Cocoon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

Literary accounts of the search for life-giving springs go back to the epic of Gilgamesh. In the 4,000-year-old Sumerian poem, the titular ruler of Babylon traveled into the Waters of Death where, “Under the sea there is a wondrous plant, like a flower with thorns, that will return a man to his youth.” The story, written down on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia around 2,100 B.C., is the seed to the legend. One story spread across dozens of cultures and thousands of years, as Luke lectures his team. 

Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, called upon his subjects to search for the key to eternity in the 210’s B.C. so his dynasty could live for 10,000 generations. In Greek myth, the Hesperides were maidens who guarded golden apples that, once eaten, promised everlasting life. Anyone who drank from the Holy Grail would find immortality. Alexander the Great went to India in search of the waters of life. And Diane de Poitiers, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in 16th-century France, drank gold to preserve her exquisite looks, the Botox of the Renaissance.

It’s every studio head’s dream: Send your lead actors into magical waters and watch them come out the other side forever young, beautiful and marketable. 

But the version of the fountain of youth myth that has the strongest hold on contemporary culture comes not from ancient times, from Egypt, Greece or Rome. The legend was born when Spain’s conquistadors ransacked the Americas for gold, silver and precious gems. 

In 1516 the Italian historian of religion Peter Martyr told Pope Leo X that “There is an island named Boiuca or Agnaneo [in the Bahamas] in which is a continual spring of running water of such marvelous virtue that the water thereof being drunk, perhaps through some deity, makes old men young again.” (Even today, the magician David Copperfield who owns a 700-acre island in the Bahamas, claims the local water does “miraculous things… Bugs or insects that are near death come in contact with the water, they fly away.”)

It was in search this rumored fountain of youth that the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León supposedly hightailed from the Bahamas to Florida in 1513 to get famous and be forever young. 

After being shipwrecked, at aged 13, on the Florida Keys around 1549, and living among Native Americans for 17 years, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda — from a noble family in Cartagena, Colombia — heard all about Ponce de León. The explorer, Fontaneda later wrote, “giving heed to the tale of the Indians of Cuba and Santo Domingo, went to Florida in search of the River Jordan… the kings and caciques [rulers] of Florida, although savages, took information and sought after, as though they had been a more polite people, that they might see what river that could be which did such good work, even to the turning of aged men and women back to their youth.”

A legend was born. Old Spanish towns like St. Augustine today claim to be the real fountain whose waters amazed the adventurer when he planted a Spanish flag on La Florida. In truth, however, Ponce de León was principally interested in gold, riches and slaves. The myth was in fact, born from tongue-in-cheek muckraking, designed to tarnish the macho explorer as needing the fountain because he was suffering from enflaquecimiento del sexo – impotence! 

But there’s a twist to the tale — a sinkhole shaped like an hourglass is off the beaten track in Sarasota County, Florida. Since the 19^th century, entrepreneurs promoted Warm Mineral Springs as the genuine Fountain of Youth discovered by Ponce de León. 

Sadly, there’s no proof the Spaniard ever reached Sarasota. Daniel De Narvaez, a Colombian maritime historian, is related to the great explorer through his fifteenth great-grandfather, Juan Pérez Ponce de León y Ayala, the first Marqués de Cádiz.

“Ponce de León, like other conquistadors, had the responsibility to finance his expeditions and establish settlements in new lands, as stipulated by royal agreements,” De Narvaez told The Hollywood Reporter. “In this context, it’s understandable that attractive stories were promoted to motivate potential settlers and financiers. The legend of the Fountain of Youth, although fascinating, appears to have been a construction that emerged after Ponce de León’s death… writers like Washington Irving in the 19th century contributed to popularizing this romantic image of the explorer seeking eternal youth, which has influenced the modern perception of his figure.”

“As handy as it would be to have secret family documents mapping the source to everlasting life or hidden vials of magic water,” De Narvaez adds, “the reality is more sober. Juan Ponce de León did lay claim to La Florida for Ferdinand II of Aragon, but he never said a word about a fountain of youth. The secret to immortality certainly never helped him when he was shot and killed by an arrow fired by a Calusa Native American in 1521. It’s just the myth that’s immortal.”

But what about Warm Mineral Springs themselves? Well, they have serious credentials. 

At 240 feet in diameter, the pool is the largest mineral spring in the world. Magical things happen to the water as it flows up 7,000 feet from one of the deepest aquifers in Florida. The geothermal water, naturally heated to 37 degrees Celsius, is blended with 51 minerals. Bathers who take the waters swear they can miraculously cure everything from stress, kidney problems and slipped discs to arthritis and heart failure.

Beneath the surface of Warm Mineral Springs, divers have discovered prehistoric remains dating back 10,000 years. The location was evidently a sacred place where the ancient buried their dead and saber-tooth tigers snarled. It would make a great movie, right? Thousands of years before even Gilgamesh, people had maybe already discovered the secret to a long life.

As for the dream of stopping aging, a billion-dollar industry today, the comedian Bob Hope was probably nearest to the truth when he said, “My secret for staying young is good food, plenty of rest, and a makeup man with a spray gun.”