Before the legend of a lost city, there was a man. In the Colombian Andes, the Muisca people practiced a unique ceremony to initiate their new leader, or zipa. The ritual began at Lake Guatavita, a sacred crater lake nearly 3,000 meters above sea level. The new leader was stripped naked, his body coated in sticky resin, and then covered from head to toe in fine gold dust until he gleamed in the sun. He was El Dorado, ‘the Gilded One’. Accompanied by four attendants, he boarded a ceremonial reed raft and sailed to the center of the lake. There, as his subjects threw offerings of gold and emeralds from the shore, he would dive into the water, washing the gold from his body as a sacrifice to the gods.
The Legend of El Dorado
The story of the mythical city of gold, which began with a Muisca ritual where a leader offered gold dust as a sacrifice to the gods.
Chapter 1
The Gilded Man
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Frequently Asked Questions
Was El Dorado a real city of gold?
No, the legend began with a real person, not a place. The leader of the Muisca people in Colombia was known as 'El Dorado' (The Gilded One) during a ritual where his body was covered in gold dust before he dove into a sacred lake to wash it off as a sacrifice to the gods.
Did anyone ever find treasure in Lake Guatavita?
Several attempts were made to drain the lake. In the 1580s, Antonio de Sepúlveda recovered items worth about 12,000 pesos before his project collapsed. A 20th-century expedition found only about £500 worth of artifacts before going bankrupt.
How do we know the 'Gilded Man' ritual actually happened?
In 1969, three Colombian farmers discovered a small golden sculpture called the 'Muisca Raft'. The artifact clearly depicts a chief on a raft with his attendants, matching historical descriptions of the El Dorado ceremony and providing archaeological proof of the legend's origin.
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