El Dorado was originally a golden man, not a city of gold
The legend began with a ruler, the Golden One, who coated himself in gold dust and washed it off in a sacred lake. Spanish treasure hunters turned that ritual into a lost golden kingdom and chased it from the Colombian highlands deep into the Amazon, losing hundreds of men on the way.
The story traces to the Muisca of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in present-day Colombia, skilled goldsmiths whose installation of a new zipa, or ruler, was later said to involve offerings of gold at Lake Guatavita. Over time the name El Dorado slid from the man to a city or kingdom of fabulous riches. Later efforts to drain Guatavita for treasure followed, and the Muisca raft, a gold model linked to the tradition, is now in Bogotá's Museo del Oro.
Europeans arrived primed to believe. Columbus, seeing gold ornaments in the Caribbean in 1492, promised Spain's monarchs as much gold as they needed. Old tales fed the hope: the Greek Isles of the Blessed, which the second-century writer Lucian filled with cities of gold, ivory and emeralds; Atlantis; the medieval Isle of Seven Cities. The Caribbean's modest gold ran out fast, but Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs and Pizarro's of the Incas convinced adventurers that more lay inland.
Much of the early searching was done by Germans. Charles V had granted Venezuela to the Welser banking family of Augsburg as security for a loan, and their governor Ambrosius Dalfinger set out from Coro in 1529, hunting for a passage to the Pacific and hearing of a gold-working people in the mountains who also traded salt. Nikolaus Federmann mistook the flooded llanos grasslands for a sea. After Sebastián de Belalcázar took Quito in 1534, a captured chief from the north was nicknamed the golden Indian. Georg Hohermuth's two-year trek along the Andes cost over 200 lives. It was Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a lawyer turned commander, who followed the salt trade up the Magdalena and in March 1537 reached the Muisca plateau, where villages yielded gold and emeralds.
Conquest did not end the dream. Expeditions linked to Francisco Orellana, Philipp von Hutten and Walter Raleigh pushed the imagined city into the Amazon and the Guianas, and in the 17th century maps showed a vast inland Lake Parime that geographers later dismissed. El Dorado survives as shorthand for impossible wealth and obsessive quests, turning up in Voltaire's Candide and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
Source: El Dorado
