El Dorado: How Legends are Made

In 1492, a new world was revealed to the Europeans, one brimming with untouched rainforests, great deposits of natural mineral wealth, and populations of humans who had created some of the most impressive empires in history. To the delight of the conquistadors, the people living here adorned themselves with gold and jewels thoughtlessly, completely unaware of the incredible value the conquistadors placed in it. Not long after, rumors began to spread amongst the explorers, and eventually the general population, about the abundance of gold to be found in this new world. If these seemingly primitive people could afford to wear extravagant amounts of gold, surely there must be more hidden deeper within the jungle. From this suspicion, eventually talk of a city made entirely out of gold hidden deep within the mountains and forest was passed all the way back to Europe. This city was called El Dorado. Before long, expeditions with the sole purpose of discovering this city were launched into South and Central America. Fortunes were spent and lives were lost in search of this mystical place to no avail. To this day, the legend of El Dorado, the city of gold, remains one of the greatest and most popular legends in history, rivaled only by similar myths of lost cities like Atlantis, beneath the ocean waters, and Shangri-La, hidden within the Himalaya mountains. This story has inspired some good movies, some bad movies, and some good bad movies. But no matter the quality of the movie, each one of these takes some liberties with the original idea in different ways. But the true story of El Dorado and where this legend came from, I think, is even more interesting. It all started, well, more than 3,000 years ago, around 1270 BCE, in the lowland regions of Colombia. At this time, a people group known as the Muisca were transitioning from a hunter-gatherer society into an agrarian one, and began moving into the neighboring mountains where the land was more suited for growing crops. To do this, they had to displace even more ancient civilizations that have since faded into mystery. After they migrated, they ended up inhabiting this general area, which, at most, totals only around 4,000 square kilometers, or about the same size as the state of Rhode Island. For comparison, the Inca Empire stretched over an amazing 2 million square kilometers, which is bigger than the country of Mexico. And yet, the small size of the Muisca civilization did not hold them back at all. In the pre-colonial Americas, there are typically considered to be four highly advanced civilizations. The Muisca people, the Inca Empire, the Aztec Empire, and the Maya Empire. I hope you noticed a pattern there. All of these were empires except the Muisca, who formed a loose confederation of smaller tribes that would work and trade together. Each tribe had its own leader, but together, they recognized what they called the Zipa, who was essentially their chief. The principal settlement of the Muisca, their capital city per se, was called by the name Bagata, which eventually became Bogota when the Spanish invaded, and remains the capital city of Colombia. Other than their advanced technologies which could rival the Inca, Aztec, and Maya, another thing the Muisca had in common with their neighbors was a rich mythology. The principal entity of Muisca beliefs was a being called Chiminigagua, the creator of the universe. After building the universe, Chiminigagua cast two black birds out in opposite directions to illuminate what he had created, giving light to everything. Aside from this, he was also known to have created many deities, the most important being Tzua, the god of the sun, Xie, the god of the moon, and Kukavira, the god of the rainbow. Because of the things he created, Chiminigagua was closely associated with light, as he both brought light to the universe and created the gods related to light. And so, to represent Chiminigagua in the real world, an object had to be bright and lustrous as well. The metal uña, what we'd call gold, became a symbol of this creator, and therefore was sacred beyond measure to the Muisca people. And so, to please Chiminigagua, a sacrifice of gold was necessary. No event in Muisca culture required more good faith and blessings than the welcoming of a new Zipa, a new spiritual and social leader who was supposed to keep their confederation unified. On this occasion, when a new Zipa was appointed, they first needed to make a ritual sacrifice to the gods in order to please them. The details of this sacrifice were first recorded by outsiders in 1638 by Juan Rodriguez Freyer. He was born in Bogota and grew up in the land that would eventually become Colombia, and came to know the leader of the remaining Muisca people who had inhabited the surrounding lands. It's through this friendship with the old Muisca leader that Freyer became incredibly knowledgeable in the practices of the natives enough to describe the ritual of the Zipa sacrifice. He began his account with, the first journey he had to make was to go to the great lagoon of Guatavita to make offerings and sacrifices to the demon, which they worshipped as their god and lord. After he arrived, they made a raft of rushes, embellishing and decorating it with the most attractive things they had. Once the raft was finished, they stripped the air to his skin and anointed him with his sticky earth, on which they placed gold dust so that he was completely covered with this metal. Then, they placed him on the raft, and at his feet they placed a great heap of gold and emeralds for him to offer to his god. Finally, when all the preparations had been made, the gilded Indian then threw out all of the pile of gold into the middle of the lake. To end, Freyer wrote, this is the ceremony that became the famous El Dorado, and the very origin of the name El Dorado supports this. In Spanish, El Dorado translates into The Golden, which yeah, doesn't make any sense. That's because it was originally called El Hombre Dorado, which translates into The Golden Man, meaning to describe the Zipa covered in gold while performing this sacrifice. So, El Dorado was a person, not a city. Well, that's how it started anyway. Although Freyer was the first European to record this ritual, Colombia already hosted a substantial colonial population by 1520, and it was likely either seen by or described to an earlier European explorer. This rumor of a place filled with gold found its way back to Europe, and by 1529, more than 100 years before Freyer first wrote about the ritual, it was the Germans, led by a man named Ambrosius Erringer, who launched the first expedition into the South American rainforests with the sole purpose of discovering a city of gold. This expedition was a failure, and in 1533, Ambrosius himself was shot with a poison arrow and died. After this, a man who had survived this failed expedition, another German conquistador, Jorvon Speer, then led his own expedition with the same goal in mind. Unlike Ambrosius, Speer actually survived his expedition, but he embarked into the jungle with over 2,000 men, and returned with only 80 survivors. That means a little less than 2,000 people died on this expedition alone, hoping to find something that didn't exist. In 1536, the Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada led an army of 800 men into the Colombian interior in search of more gold. During this expedition, he made contact with the Muisca people and found them to be wearing extravagant amounts of gold on their bodies. This convinced Quesada that there could be truth in a golden city after all, and Quesada decided to invade and conquer these people. When asked, many of the conquered Muisca people told stories of a ritual involving their leader covered in gold while throwing gold into a lake, but either through the exaggeration on the part of the Muisca people, or mistranslation on the part of the Spanish, and likely both to be honest. A lake full of gold became a city made of gold, hidden somewhere within the Colombian highlands. And afterwards, Quesada's invasion of the Muisca people brought a tremendous amount of gold back to Europe, and helped convince any skeptics that gold was plentiful in the new world, and a city of gold was possible. Then, expedition after expedition was mounted, and yet nothing akin to a city of gold was to be found. Ironically, the more invested the Spanish became in finding the city of El Dorado, the more they oppressed the Muisca people, putting an end to their rituals and traditions, including the very ritual that was El Hombre Dorado. Essentially, they destroyed El Dorado by trying to find it. But certain people did begin to understand that Lake Guatavita, where the Zipa ritual took place, was where everyone pointed to when asked about gold. In 1545, conquistadors Lázaro Fonte and Hernán Pérez de Quesada forced the native people to manually drain the lake using buckets. After three months, the water in the lake had dropped by only around 3 meters, but that was enough to reveal $100,000 in today's money's worth of gold and artifacts. These, of course, were brought back to Europe again and helped convince even more people to join in on the search for El Dorado. 35 years after this, in 15 AD, Bogota businessman Antonio de Sepúlveda financed a notch to be carved in the rim of the lake to further drain the water. This caused the water level in the lake to drop by 20 meters. This time around $400,000 worth of gold, jewelry, and armor was discovered. But after the promise of an entire city of gold, no one was left satisfied. It's worth mentioning that, despite this, Sepúlveda died a poor man after King Philip II of Spain took his cut of the findings. But anyway, in 1801, renowned Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt toured the Americas and was really the first person to record them on a modern, scientific sense. He was also the first person to describe the possibility and mechanism of human-induced climate change, so this guy was pretty smart, especially for his time. After visiting Guatavita and learning of Sepúlveda's findings, Humboldt estimated the lake could still contain up to $300 million worth of gold within it. This alone was enough to convince the contractors LTD of London to form the Company for the Exploitation of the Lagoon of Guatavita, which, yeah, was its actual name. In 1895, they dug a tunnel to entirely drain the lake. What was left was more than a meter of mud. Exploring anything within this mud was nearly impossible, and soon the mud dried and hardened so that it couldn't even be sifted through. Artifacts worth only around $600 were recovered from this endeavor, and soon after, the company filed for bankruptcy. Finally, in 1965, the Colombian government banned all further attempts to salvage artifacts from the lake, finally putting an end to hundreds of years wasted in search for El Dorado. In the end, literally thousands of lives were lost, fortunes were spent and never recovered, and an entire civilization was destroyed in pursuit of gold. The ironic part of all of this is that the region of Colombia that was inhabited by the Muisca is not even particularly rich in gold deposits. The land was, however, actually rich in salt, emeralds, and copper, and the people here were incredibly skilled craftsmen. The great quantities of gold the Muisca had accumulated came not from where they lived, but from trade with the I'll let you take away whatever lesson you want from this story, and there's quite a few to choose from, but my favorite one is this. At this time, the Europeans were obsessed with acquiring wealth, in part due to their belief that a full treasury made a country powerful, while the Muisca revered the same metal because they believed it brought them closer to their god. To accumulate greater treasuries, the Spanish scoured the New World and carried away ludicrous amounts of gold and silver to the point where their own economic system collapsed, while the Muisca collected so much of this gold that they made themselves the primary targets of conquistadors. Gold, or more accurately, the determination to acquire gold in one way or another led to the destruction of both people. I, on the other hand, only acquire wealth by telling my viewers about my Patreon. If you'd like to donate, it's really helpful for me, and you'd get your name in my video like all these generous folk. If not, that's fine too. I hope you enjoyed this video, and please, if you want me to make more videos like this, tell me by leaving a like or maybe even a comment. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any more videos. I'll be back soon with another one. Thanks for watching.