6. The Real Life Origins of the Fictional El Dorado
In the children’s game of telephone, a message passed on in whispers from one person to another gradually gets altered with each retelling, until the final recipient ends up with something completely from what had originally been said. The same thing seems to have happened with the legend of El Dorado, the fictional City of Gold. It began with the first Spaniards who came in contact with the native Muisca people, in today’s Colombia. From them, they heard stories about chiefs who coated themselves in gold dust as part of a religious ceremony.
They then rowed into Lake Guatavita, about 35 miles northeast of modern Bogota, to drop golden gifts for the water god. The Spaniards coined a term for those mythical Muisca chiefs: El Hombre Dorado, or “The Golden Man”. Over the years, and with repeated retellings, El Hombre Dorado was transformed. What began as a tribal chief coated in gold dust became a city made of gold, then a kingdom of gold, and finally a fabulously wealthy empire that had more gold than the rest of the world put together.
