El Dorado

A REAL Muisca gold ceremony that grew into the myth of a golden city

El Dorado began as a man, not a city. The name means the Gilded One, and it belonged first to the rulers of the Muisca, the people of the high plateau around present-day Bogotá in the Colombian Andes, and to a ceremony at Lake Guatavita, a small round lake 3,000 metres up, 57 km northeast of the capital.

The fullest account comes from Juan Rodríguez Freyle, who wrote it down in 1636 and said he had it from the nephew of the last ruler of Guatavita. Before taking office, the heir spent a time secluded in a cave, forbidden salt, chilli and women. Then he was brought to the lake, stripped, coated in sticky resin and blown over with fine gold dust until he shone. With four attendants hung with gold, he went out on a raft of reeds piled with gold and emeralds, while incense smoked from braziers on the raft and around the shore. In the middle of the lake the music stopped, the treasure went over the side, the crowds on the shore threw in their own offerings, and the gilded man plunged into the water and came out washed clean, and king.

The Muisca were superb goldsmiths. Gold for them meant lustre, incorruptibility and the sun, not money, and they offered it to the gods in vast quantities. Their most famous piece, the golden raft found in a clay vessel in a cave at Pasca in 1969, cast by lost wax between 1295 and 1410, shows a chief and his attendants on a raft. Some scholars read it as the Guatavita rite itself, others as one of many similar ceremonies across Muisca country. It is now a national emblem of Colombia and sits in the Gold Museum in Bogotá.

To the conquistadors the story meant only gold. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada reached the Muisca highlands in 1537, and the Gilded One grew into a golden city and then a whole kingdom that drifted ahead of every expedition, from the Andes to the Amazon and the Guianas: Gonzalo Pizarro, Orellana, Philipp von Hutten, Pedro de Ursúa, Antonio de Berrío and Walter Raleigh all went looking, and Lake Parime appeared on maps until geographers struck it off.

The lake itself was attacked too. In the 1580s Antonio de Sepúlveda cut a notch in the rim of Guatavita to drain it, and later attempts followed; they brought up a few gold and silver offerings and little else. The lake is probably a collapse crater over dissolved salt, not a volcano or a meteorite, and today it is a focus of ecotourism, with the legend its great attraction.