El Dorado

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

The legend that emptied Europe into South America. El Dorado, “the gilded one,” was not first a city but a man: the Muisca ruler who, in a real ceremony at Lake Guatavita in the highlands of Colombia, covered himself in gold dust and rowed out to cast gold and emeralds into the water as an offering. The Spanish heard the story, imagined a city of gold, and killed and died by the thousand hunting a place that never existed. The lake is real, offerings of gold have been dredged from it, and the ceremony was real; the golden city was the dream that grew from it.