Lake Guatavita

Also Known As: Spanish Laguna de Guatavita; officially Laguna del Cacique Guatavita; the name is that of the Muisca chiefdom and its lord, not of the lake itself
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Colombian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: The lake takes gold and emeralds and gives nothing back, and the drowned wife of its cacique is said to keep a palace on its floor.
Role in Mythos: It is the shrine where a new lord of Guatavita was gilded and rowed out to make his offering, the ceremony that seeded the story of El Dorado.
Relation to Humans: The Muisca came up to its rim to give, and Europeans came to take, and four centuries of tunnels, ditches and drowned workmen have not settled which of them the lake preferred. Today it sits inside a protected reserve, and the objects that surface from it are handed to the state rather than to a shipping agent in London.

The water is clear and it tastes wrong. Fray Pedro Simón got it exactly right in the seventeenth century when he wrote that it was clear enough but not pleasant, with a faint bite to it like water out of a pump, and that the whole lake was fed by little springs off the hill above, all of them together making about an arm’s worth of water. Low trees ring the edge, as many as the cold of the páramo will permit. At 2,990 metres the air is thin and the light comes in hard and flat, and on a still afternoon the surface goes to glass, with birds crossing it and small waves working at the pebbles on the shore. Nothing about the place suggests it has swallowed several fortunes and a number of men.

Seen from above it looks like a cup, smaller than its numbers say. The water is about 400 metres across, the rim above it perhaps 600, and the deepest sounding is 17 metres. The sides run down at 32 to 38 degrees, which is steep enough to be awkward and not steep enough to be a cliff. On the northern side the ring is broken by a deep notch, and that notch is not natural. It is the accumulated appetite of four centuries, cut and recut by men who were certain the lake was a bank.

Its roundness invited a tidy explanation, and for a while it got two. A crater was the obvious guess, except that there is no volcanic or igneous rock for many leagues in any direction. Then came the meteorite, argued in the 1950s by the geologist H. C. Raasveldt, who proposed a four million tonne aerolite punching a hundred metres into the sandstone. It is a wonderful idea and it failed every test put to it. Geologists went over the rim with magnets and found no iron and no nickel, the petrography showed no impact signatures, and the lake water came back negative for chlorides and sulphates. What is left is duller and more probable: the rocks here are the upper Guadalupe formation, sandstones and cherts, and beneath the region lie salt beds that are worked commercially to this day. Dissolve the salt slowly enough and the roof over the void comes down. The most famous hole in Colombia is a sinkhole.

The Muisca had their own account, and it begins with a woman. The lady of Guatavita, accused of infidelity by her husband, went up to the lake with her daughter in her arms and threw herself in. Her cacique, who by every telling still loved her, tried everything to get her back. The jeques, the priests, told him she was living down there in a splendid palace with the child, and from that point the lake became a place you gave things to. Gold went in. Emeralds went in. Whatever the origin story is worth, the giving is archaeologically real.

The ceremony that made the lake famous was an investiture. Juan Rodríguez Freyle, who had it from Don Juan, cacique of Guatavita and nephew of the lord the conquistadors met, describes the heir climbing from the town up to the rim, coming down the steps of the causeway to the water, his bare body smeared with resin and then powdered over with gold. He stepped onto a raft. At his feet they piled a great heap of gold and emeralds for him to offer to his god. Four principal caciques who owed him allegiance boarded with him, in feather-work and gold crowns, armbands, chagualos and gold ear ornaments, naked as he was, each carrying his own gift. Then the raft went out, and the man made of gold went into the water.

Sebastián de Belalcázar heard a version of this in Quito, from an Indian who had come up from Bogotá, and said the sentence that ruined the next three hundred years: let us go and find this gilded Indian. What followed at Guatavita itself was less romantic than the search that spread out from it. Fray Pedro Simón records that once bearded men appeared and began looking carefully for gold among the people, the people went to where they kept it and threw it in the lake. The cacique of Simijaca alone sent in forty loads, carried up by forty men.

Then the draining started, and it never really stopped. Captain Lázaro Fonte tried first and ran out of money. Hernán Pérez de Quesada got the level down about ten feet and recovered three or four thousand pesos of fine gold for his trouble. Antonio de Sepúlveda made a formal agreement with Philip II, opened the first cut, the one still visible in the rim, and claimed more than twelve thousand pesos from the drained shallows alone. Rodríguez Freyle knew him, helped bury him in the church at Guatavita, and wrote the epitaph for the whole enterprise: it goes on forever, the lake is very deep and full of silt, and it needs a great deal of money and a great many people.

In 1821 José Ignacio París, whom everyone called Pepe, formed a company of sixteen shareholders at five hundred dollars each. By the time Captain Charles Cochrane rowed out with him in October 1823 it had cost him twenty thousand and there were still thirty three feet of water to shift. Cochrane looked at the shale, saw that it lay tilted about twenty degrees off vertical and that the water was quietly eating the toe of every slope, and advised shoring the ditch with boards. Pepe could not be persuaded. The sides came in seven times. The tunnel finally collapsed and killed a number of workmen, and that was the end of the sixteen shareholders. On the same visit Cochrane was shown the two chiefs’ tombs cut into the sandstone at the rim, and told about a cave belonging to the shrine that had two life size gilded figures standing at its mouth. A Spanish soldier had cut a finger off one of them, been attacked and wounded, and come back with an armed party. There was no cave and there were no figures. The people had sealed the entrance and put the statues in the water.

Somebody finally managed it. On 25 July 1910 two German travellers walked up to the rim and found an Englishman named W. Cooper living in two thatched huts with his dogs, eight years into the job, working for a London firm called Contractors Limited. Below them the basin was empty. A tunnel four hundred metres long and two metres high had taken the water out, a stream ran through the mud at the bottom, and a dozen men were down in the silt with picks and shovels. Cooper showed off his museum of pottery and stone ornaments, apologised that the gold had all gone to London a few months earlier, and gave them the ledger: since 1909, five hundred pounds sterling in gold and about seventy in emeralds. He was photographed, the drained lake was photographed, and then the war of 1914 and a shortage of funds closed the whole thing down. The mud, drying, set like concrete.

What the lake has not surrendered, other places have. In 1856 the Tovar brothers partly drained Siecha, one lake over, and brought up a small votive raft crowded with figures, which Liborio Zerda engraved and published in 1883 as a picture of the Guatavita ceremony; it was sold abroad and lost, though the Colombian accounts and the older ones disagree on its weight and on whether it burned on arrival at Bremen or simply vanished from a Berlin museum. Then in early 1969 a farmer named Cruz María Dimaté and his son found a ceramic pot in a cave on a cold ridge above Pasca, south of Bogotá, and inside it the finest object Muisca goldsmiths are known to have made. The Balsa Muisca is 19.5 centimetres long, cast in one pour by the lost wax method, more than eighty percent gold with silver and copper in the alloy. A large chief sits in a chair at the centre; ten smaller figures surround him, two at the prow in jaguar masks with rattles, and the smallest ones at the gunwale are unmistakably paddling. It is the ceremony, in metal. It did not come from Guatavita.

That is the joke the lake has been telling for four hundred years. When archaeologists finally surveyed the ground around it properly in 2009, the type and distribution of what they found pointed to a shrine used for small, repeated, modest offerings rather than the mass spectacles the chronicles describe. The gold that everybody dug for was mostly in the chronicles. What the lake actually holds is silt, seventeen metres of water, and the patience to outlast every engineer who has come at it. In 2006 a workman building the footpath around the rim turned up a buried pot with four pre Columbian pieces in it and put them in his pocket, and his neighbours told him flatly that they belonged neither to him nor to the regional authority but to their culture, and he handed them to the national institute. Four centuries after Sepúlveda, that is the first recorded case of something going back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Lake Guatavita?

Lake Guatavita is a small, near circular lake at 2,990 metres in the Colombian eastern highlands, in the municipality of Sesquilé in Cundinamarca. It was the most important shrine of the Muisca chiefdom of Guatavita, and the ceremony performed there gave rise to the legend of El Dorado.

Why is Lake Guatavita connected to El Dorado?

Spanish chroniclers described an investiture at the lake in which the incoming cacique was smeared with resin, powdered with gold dust, and rowed out on a raft to throw gold and emeralds into the water. Sebastián de Belalcázar heard the story in Quito and set out to find the gilded man, and the search for that man became the search for a golden kingdom.

Has Lake Guatavita ever been drained?

Yes, repeatedly, and once completely. Antonio de Sepúlveda cut the first drain under an agreement with Philip II, José Ignacio París spent a fortune and lost workmen to a tunnel collapse in the 1820s, and an English firm called Contractors Limited emptied the basin entirely by 1910 using a tunnel four hundred metres long. The recovered gold never came close to covering the cost.

Was Lake Guatavita formed by a meteorite?

Almost certainly not. The meteorite hypothesis was tested and failed, with no iron or nickel found around the rim, no impact signatures in the rock, and negative water chemistry. Geologists now favour a collapse caused by the slow dissolution of salt deposits beneath the anticline.

Is the Muisca Raft in the Gold Museum from Lake Guatavita?

No. The Balsa Muisca was found in early 1969 inside a ceramic vessel in a cave above Pasca, well south of the lake, and was acquired by the Banco de la República for the Museo del Oro. It depicts the raft ceremony associated with Guatavita, but it was offered somewhere else entirely.