El Dorado

El Dorado — Spanish for "the golden one" — began not as a city but as a man: a Muisca ritual in which a newly chosen chief was covered in gold dust and, on a raft, cast offerings of gold and emeralds into the sacred waters of Lake Guatavita in the highlands of present-day Colombia. Spanish conquistadors who heard fragments of the rite transformed it, over the sixteenth century, into the myth of a whole kingdom of gold hidden somewhere in the interior of South America. The legend launched some of the most disastrous expeditions of the colonial era, drawing men like Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and, later, Sir Walter Raleigh deep into the Amazon and the Andes in search of a city that never existed. Repeated attempts were even made to drain Lake Guatavita to reach the treasure believed to lie on its bottom. Though no golden city was ever found, the offerings recovered from Andean lakes are real, and El Dorado endures as the archetype of the unreachable treasure — a symbol of greed, obsession and the lengths to which people will go chasing a rumor of gold.