El Dorado: The Golden Man Who Became a Lost City

Your boots rotted off somewhere in the second month, half the expedition is shaking with fever, and the golden city is — your guide swears it, the guides always swear it — one more river away. Men followed that sentence into the Amazon and the Orinoco for three centuries. A remarkable number of them never came back out.

The joke buried inside the legend is that El Dorado was never a city at all. The Spanish phrase means "the gilded one," and it described a man. Among the Muisca people of the Colombian highlands, a new ruler was said to be coated in gold dust and floated out on a raft into Lake Guatavita, where he and his attendants tipped gold and emeralds into the water as an offering. The ceremony was already history by the time conquistadors heard about it secondhand in the 1530s. A rite performed on one small crater lake became, in the retelling, a kingdom where gold was as common as mud.

From a man to a city to an empire

Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada conquered the Muisca in 1537 and found real gold but no golden city, so the city obligingly moved. In 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro marched east from Quito with a small army; the expedition collapsed, and his lieutenant Francisco de Orellana ended up making the first known descent of the Amazon more or less by accident. Half a century later Sir Walter Raleigh went hunting a version called Manoa, on a lake named Parime in Guiana, and published a glowing account in 1596. He returned in 1617, lost his son in a botched raid on a Spanish post, and was executed in 1618 partly for the fiasco. Lake Parime went on appearing on respectable maps until Alexander von Humboldt surveyed the region around 1800 and found no lake at all.

Draining Guatavita

The one address the legend ever had was treated accordingly. In the 1580s a merchant named Antonio de Sepulveda cut a notch in the crater rim to lower the water; the notch is still visible, the recovered gold was modest, and he died poor. In 1898 a British company drained the lake almost to the bottom, watched the exposed mud dry to something like concrete, salvaged a disappointing scatter of objects, and folded. Colombia protected the lake in 1965. Four years later, in a cave near the town of Pasca, farmers found the small gold votive raft — a chieftain and his attendants frozen mid-ceremony — that now sits in Bogota's Museo del Oro, quietly confirming that the ritual, at least, was real.

What is actually going on

El Dorado behaves like a mirage because it was one: desire, translation error and distance, compounding. Every failed expedition proved only that the city lay further in, which is the sunk-cost fallacy wearing a pith helmet. Percy Fawcett walked into the Mato Grosso in 1925 chasing his own variant and was never seen again. The irony is that modern archaeology, armed with lidar and soil science, keeps finding genuinely large pre-Columbian settlements in Amazonia — earthworks, causeways, engineered black earth. There were cities in the forest after all. None were made of gold, which is somehow the most believable detail in the entire story.

Regional folklore adds its own commentary: Colombian and Brazilian tradition peoples the forest with guardians like the curupira, who leads greedy men in circles until they die. As folklore goes, it is at least honest about the outcome.

Readers have filed their own accounts of lost places, jungle lights and treasure hunts below, and the jury votes each one True, Fake or Not sure. Read the testimony before you buy a machete.