The Real El Dorado

 

                  

 No, not this one, but it is fabulous in a different sense.  We remember the Coronado  Expedition's search through the Southwest for the wealthy Seven Cities of Cibola, and DeSoto's likewise for precious metals to the east in North America.  The persistent legend of El Dorado brought Sir Walter Raleigh to Guiana in South America twice, with, similarly, no results.  In an age when the maps showed many imaginary lands, one of which was supposed to be inhabited by people whose heads protruded from their stomachs, there was a lot more belief than factual knowledge.  Sadly for the ill-fated plunderers, there was truly an El Dorado, but they missed it.  We would get lost, too, as the phrase really means "the golden one," not the name of a place.

It was far away and long ago (as all good stories should begin).  Conquistador Don Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, conquerer of New Granada for the Spanish empire in South America, was said to have found so much gold in his searches through the forbidding interior that the pile in his Bogota courtyard was so high it could obscure a horse and rider behind it. But tales themselves grow ever taller with time and distance.

Don Quesada had heard from captured natives of the gold- and jewel- rich kingdom of the Muiscas, where the golden one himself ruled.  In 1536 he took an army of 800 to the plains and valleys of central Columbia to find Tisquesusa, the Zipa of Bagata (only 166 reached the end of the journey alive). The Muisca, speakers of the Chibcha language family, were numerous and advanced (considered one of the four such societies along with the Aztec, Maya and Inca), possessing salt mines, farms, skilled artisans and a thriving trade in gold and emeralds.  The Zipa was killed, his successor was boiled with burning fat, and their Sun Temple at Sogamoso was looted and burned.  Other than the rulers' ornaments and the contents of the temple, however, there was not a whole lot of gold, as most of it was beaten into paper-thin sheets for ceremonial uses.

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                                                      Reconstruction of the Sun Temple

They were successful in finding El Dorado, as it was Tisquesusa himself! Annually, he was covered in gold dust by his people before entering Lake Guatavita just to wash it off as an offering to its goddess.  This became the legend which traveled so far and wide.

                                                           Tisquesusa imagined

"And then you came with sword held high

You did not conquer, only die."