El Dorado

Also Known As: Spanish, “the gilded one”; first a man, later a city and then a whole country; called Manoa in the English and Spanish accounts of Guiana
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Colombian Mythology, South American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A kingdom so heavy with gold that its ruler could afford to wear the metal as powder and wash it off again at the end of the day.
Role in Mythos: It is the destination that reorganised the map of a continent, drawing Spanish, German and English expeditions inland for the better part of a century.
Relation to Humans: Nobody ever reached it, and a great many people died on the way, most of them Indigenous porters whose names were not written down. It survives less as a story people tell than as a phrase people use for anything worth ruining yourself over.

Before dawn on the high plateau the water of Guatavita is the colour of slate and cold enough to take the breath out of a chest. Fires burn all the way round the rim of the lake and the people standing at them are wearing gold: nose ornaments, diadems, flat hammered plaques that shiver when they move. Out on the water a wooden raft is being paddled slowly toward the middle. The man standing on it is naked and coated from scalp to heel in gold dust, fixed to his skin with a sticky resin, so that he takes the firelight and hands it back. At his feet is a heap of worked gold and raw emeralds. When the raft reaches the centre of the lake the heap goes into the water, and the man on the raft becomes the chief. The chroniclers do not agree on whether he went in after it.

El Dorado is not a place name and was never meant to be one. It is Spanish for the gilded one, and for its first years alive it meant a person. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, writing his history of the Indies, put the question directly to the Spaniards who had been in Quito and had since come to Santo Domingo, of whom there were more than ten to hand: why do you call this prince dorado? Their answer is one of the few moments in the whole affair where you can hear an actual voice. He went about constantly covered in fine powdered gold, they said, because he thought that kind of covering more beautiful and more noble than any ornament of beaten metal. Other chiefs wore worked gold. He thought their decoration common. He put his on fresh every morning and washed it off in the evening.

The story reached Spanish ears in Quito, some distance from where it belonged. Juan de Castellanos, who versified the conquest in his *Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias* in 1589, has Sebastian de Belalcazar learning of it from a stranger then living in Quito who called Bogota his home: a land rich in gold and in emeralds glittering in the rock, and a chief who was stripped, covered in golden dust and carried out onto a lake on a fragile raft to make offerings. Herrera adds that an Indian at La Tacunga, also from the Bogota highlands, told Belalcazar much the same, and that this was the cause of many men undertaking the discovery of the dorado, who had until then appeared to be a phantom. It is a good word for what he was, and a better one for what he became.

The people at the centre of it were the Muisca, who held the cold plateaus and some temperate slopes of what are now Cundinamarca and Boyaca. Guatavita was one of their more prestigious chiefdoms, and its prestige came in part from the sacred lakes in the hills around the Guatavita and Guasca valley. When a chief of that people died, the nephew who succeeded him was recognised in a ceremony held on the water, which involved a raft of timbers and the throwing in of gold and emeralds. The fullest surviving description was written by Juan Rodriguez Freyle a full century after the conquest, in 1636, which is late enough that it should be read as a chronicler’s reconstruction rather than an eyewitness report, and it is still the account everything else is measured against.

Then in 1969 two farmers put a hand into a small cave on a moor above Pasca, south of Bogota, and pulled out a ceramic vessel with gold inside it. One of the pieces is a raft. It is nineteen and a half centimetres long and fits in two hands. A large figure sits at the centre on a stool, richly dressed, ringed by ten smaller ones: some carrying lime gourds, two at the front holding jaguar masks and shaman’s rattles, the smallest crouched at the rim as paddlers. It was cast in one pour by the lost wax method, in gold of more than eighty per cent with native silver and copper in the alloy, without a single joint or solder. It was not found in Lake Guatavita and was never meant to be admired. It was an offering, buried at what may have been a cosmological edge of Muisca territory, and it is the closest thing anyone has to a photograph of the ceremony.

There had been another. In 1856 the brothers Joaquin and Bernardino Tovar partly drained the lake at Siecha and brought up a smaller gold raft of a hundred and sixty two grams, which Liborio Zerda published with an engraving in 1883 in a book called *El Dorado*. Museums wanted it. A diplomat sold it, legally at the time, to a German buyer, and it burned in a fire at the port of Bremen when the ship carrying it arrived. The one object in this story that anyone actually got their hands on turned into smoke on a dock.

By then the gilded man had stopped being a man. The Spanish began speaking of the valley of the Gilded One, then of a rich country called Meta out on the plains, then of the Omaguas on the upper Amazon, and the location slid east and south with every failure. Philip von Hutten, riding for the Welser company out of Coro with forty horsemen, looked down a hillside at an Omagua settlement laid out in streets with one tall structure standing above the roofs and was certain he had found the palace. The war drums started before he reached the bottom of the slope. He was driven off with a wound in his side, and later murdered in a Spanish camp and beheaded with a rusty machete that had been used shortly before for cutting wood. By 1596 the thing had crossed languages entirely and Walter Ralegh was publishing an account of the large, rich and beautiful empire of Guiana together with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa, which, he noted, the Spaniards call El Dorado.

The arithmetic of the search is grim and worth stating plainly. Gonzalo Pizarro left Quito with two hundred and twenty men to find the cinnamon country and the gilded king, and came back onto the plateau of Quito after two years with the survivors dressed in animal skins because the rain had rotted their clothes off them, their swords rusted through and sheathless, their feet bare and cut, so changed that people who knew them could not recognise them, and so hungry they had to be held back from the food. His lieutenant Francisco de Orellana, sent ahead by river for supplies, could not fight the current back and rode the water all the way to the sea, arriving at Cubagua in September 1541 and incidentally putting Amazons on the map of the largest river in the world. Not one of these expeditions found the gold. Every one of them found people, and treated them accordingly.

What El Dorado grants is motion. It is always one range further on, one river more, in the country of the tribe you have not reached yet, and its single reliable property is that it dissolves the moment somebody arrives. The great city becomes a village of eight hundred people with a communal house in the middle. The inland sea becomes a floodplain. The kingdom becomes a lake you could walk around in an afternoon. It cannot be defended, conquered or possessed, because there is nothing there to hold, and this turns out to be the most durable form a place can take.

The lake itself has been surveyed properly. Archaeological work around Guatavita, published by Juan Pablo Quintero-Guzman of the Museo del Oro in 2023, found material consistent with a shrine where small offerings were made steadily over time, rather than the mass spectacles the chroniclers described. The chiefdom was real, the gold was real, the reverence was real. The treasury was not. What went into that water was religion, in ordinary quantities, by people who had no idea what was about to be built on top of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is El Dorado?

El Dorado is a South American legend that began with a person rather than a place. The Spanish phrase means “the gilded one” and originally referred to a chief who covered his body in gold dust, most closely associated with the Muisca people of the Colombian highlands. Only later did the name come to mean a golden city, and later still an entire golden kingdom.

Where is El Dorado supposed to be?

The oldest version of the legend places it in the Muisca highlands around Lake Guatavita, north of modern Bogota. As expedition after expedition failed, Spanish, German and English searchers moved the supposed location east and south, first to the plains of Meta, then to the Omagua country on the upper Amazon, and finally to Guiana, where Walter Ralegh called the city Manoa.

Was the El Dorado ceremony real?

The ceremony itself appears to have been. Spanish chroniclers describe a Muisca succession rite held on a lake, in which the heir was covered in gold dust and gold and emeralds were thrown into the water, and a gold votive raft found in 1969 near Pasca shows a richly dressed figure surrounded by attendants on exactly such a craft. Archaeological survey around Lake Guatavita, however, points to a shrine used for modest, repeated offerings rather than the enormous ceremonies the chronicles imagined.

Did anyone ever find El Dorado?

No one did. Gonzalo Pizarro’s expedition out of Quito returned after two years in rags with nothing to show for it, Philip von Hutten mistook an Omagua town for the golden capital and was driven off, and Ralegh never located Manoa. The searches produced enormous suffering, particularly among the Indigenous peoples conscripted into them, and no golden city.

Why is El Dorado still famous?

The name outlived the search because it stopped being a destination and became a figure of speech, used for any prize that keeps receding as you approach it. It also sits at the centre of one of the best documented episodes of European wishful thinking in the Americas, with the chroniclers’ own words preserved and, unusually, a physical object in the Museo del Oro in Bogota that shows what the real ceremony behind the fantasy may have looked like.