By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026
What Was the Search for El Dorado?
The search for El Dorado was the four-century European pursuit of a treasure that did not exist in the form European explorers were looking for. The phrase began as a nickname, el dorado meaning “the gilded one,” attached to a single Muisca chieftain who was anointed in gold dust on a raft at Lake Guatavita in the highlands of present-day Colombia, and who let the dust wash off into the water as a votive offering to the lake. From that ritual the words drifted, decade by decade, into something far larger: first a place where the rite happened, then a city of gold, then a kingdom in the interior, then a lost civilization somewhere east of the Andes that successive expeditions failed to find. Each drift was driven by colonial economics and indigenous testimony refracted through Spanish translation. The search killed thousands and produced, almost incidentally, the first European descent of the Amazon and one of the earliest English ethnographies of South America.
The historical kernel under all of it is well documented. The Muisca rite at Guatavita was real; the gold offerings were real; the artifacts have been recovered; the chieftain at the center of the original phrase was a person, not a metaphor. What follows traces the legend from that kernel outward through the entradas of Sebastián de Belalcázar, Gonzalo Pizarro, Lope de Aguirre, and Walter Raleigh, the dredging and drainage of Guatavita itself, and the nineteenth-century reframing by Alexander von Humboldt that returned the legend to the lake. The story sits within the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries.
The Muisca Kernel: El Dorado as a Person
Before El Dorado was a city it was a man on a raft. The Muisca, the Chibcha-speaking polity of the Cundinamarca and Boyacá highlands, practiced an investiture ceremony for the new zipa of the southern Muisca confederation at Lake Guatavita, a near-circular crater lake about thirty-five miles northeast of present-day Bogotá. The ruler-elect was stripped, coated in resin, dusted with powdered gold until the skin shone, and rowed on a balsa raft to the lake’s center. There he threw gold and emerald offerings into the water and bathed, washing the gold from his body into the lake as the offering itself. The ceremony was not a display of wealth. It was a return of wealth to the deity that owned it [1].
The Muisca Raft from Pasca
The rite was not reconstructed from Spanish hearsay alone. In 1969 a Muisca farmer named Cruz María Dimaté found a small votive object inside a cave called La Campana, in the village of Pasca south of Bogotá. The object, now in the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, is a tumbaga raft about nineteen and a half centimeters long depicting eleven figures: a central seated chief surrounded by attendants and oarsmen on an oval reed platform. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal residue from the lost-wax casting mold yielded a date range of 1295 to 1410 CE, at least a century before the Spanish reached the highlands [2]. The raft is a depiction of the rite the Spanish had only heard described. Its discovery did not invent the historicity of the ceremony; it confirmed what the chronicles had been transmitting in distorted form for four centuries. The alloy itself, called tumbaga, is approximately sixty-five percent gold, sixteen percent silver, and nineteen percent copper. The Muisca did not value gold by purity in European terms; they valued it for the play of color the alloy permitted under different surface treatments and for its symbolic association with the sun. A wealth economy looking for hoards finds nothing legible in a religion that defines wealth as that which has been returned.
The First Drift: From the Gilded One to the Place
By the late 1530s the conquistadors approaching the Muisca highlands from three directions had already reshaped the term. Sebastián de Belalcázar (c. 1480-1551), a former lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro who had helped break the Inca, began moving north from Quito in 1535 in pursuit of an indigenous report of el indio dorado, “the gilded Indian.” Belalcázar’s treasurer Gonzalo de la Peña recorded the expedition’s purpose in 1539 as the search for “a land called el dorado,” the first time the phrase appears in the documentary record as a place name rather than a person [1]. The semantic drift had begun. By the time Belalcázar reached the Muisca plateau in 1539, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada had already conquered Bacatá and looted the Muisca palaces of substantial gold. With Nikolaus Federmann’s column from the east, the three rival captains met at Bacatá and jointly founded Bogotá on 29 April 1539. None of them found a city of gold. They found a sacred lake whose offerings had been deposited over generations and a polity whose accumulated wealth had been distributed across many shrines.
Why the Phrase Migrated
The drift from person to place was not a simple translation error. Indigenous informants, often under duress, gave Spanish interrogators what the interrogators were prepared to hear. A Muisca elder describing the rite of the gilded chieftain at Guatavita was understood as describing the location of the chieftain’s wealth, and a wealth that had been given to a lake was, to the Spanish, a wealth that could be drained. By the 1540s the chronicler Juan de Castellanos was already writing of el dorado as a kingdom; by Pedro Cieza de León’s mid-century chronicles the rite had become the seal of an empire whose center was always somewhere the Spanish had not yet reached. Both were working from earlier reports that themselves had been mediated through translation chains in which the original sense of el dorado as a person performing a single annual rite was already lost.
The Amazon Entradas: Gonzalo Pizarro and Lope de Aguirre
Once El Dorado was a kingdom it had to be somewhere. The two largest expeditions east of the Andes in the sixteenth century were not aimed at Guatavita, which was already known and partially looted, but at a kingdom called Omagua or the Land of Cinnamon, which the Spanish believed lay on the other side of the eastern cordillera in the rainforest watershed of the Amazon. Both expeditions ended in catastrophe. Both ended with their lieutenants making landfall on the Atlantic.
Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana, 1541-1542
Gonzalo Pizarro (c. 1510-1548), youngest of the four Pizarro brothers and governor of Quito after the conquest of the Inca, departed Quito in February 1541 with about two hundred and twenty Spanish soldiers, four thousand indigenous porters, two thousand pigs, and a pack of war dogs, in search of Omagua and the cinnamon forests rumored to lie east of the Andes. Within months the Andes had killed three thousand of the porters and most of the pigs. By the time the expedition reached the Coca River, a tributary of the Napo, food was gone. Pizarro ordered his lieutenant Francisco de Orellana (c. 1511-1546) to take a hastily built brigantine, the San Pedro, downstream to find provisions and return. Orellana descended the current and could not return. With fifty-seven men he sailed onward, reaching the mouth of what the Spanish would name the Amazon River on 24 August 1542, the first European descent of the river [3]. Pizarro, abandoned on the Coca with the survivors, walked back to Quito barefoot and in rags. Of the original expedition perhaps eighty Spaniards returned alive. The cinnamon, when finally identified, was a single tree species too dispersed for plantation cultivation. Omagua was nowhere.
Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre, 1559-1561
A second expedition departed for the Amazon in 1559 under Pedro de Ursúa (c. 1525-1561), a Navarrese captain commissioned by the viceroy of Peru. Ursúa assembled about three hundred and seventy Spaniards, several dozen African slaves, and as many as two thousand indigenous auxiliaries. They set out from the upper Huallaga in late September 1560. Within months the expedition collapsed into mutiny. On 1 January 1561 the Basque soldier Lope de Aguirre (c. 1510-1561) led a faction that murdered Ursúa in his hammock at the confluence of the Putumayo and the Amazon. Aguirre seized the survivors, declared himself in rebellion against the Crown of Castile, and led the column down the Amazon (or possibly the Casiquiare-Orinoco system, the route is disputed) to the Atlantic. He took the island of Margarita off Venezuela by force, marched onto the mainland, and was finally surrounded and killed by royalist forces at Barquisimeto on 27 October 1561. The Hakluyt Society’s 1861 edition of Pedro Simón’s account remains the standard primary source [4]. The expedition found no gold. It found the Amazon, again.
Walter Raleigh and the Empire of Guiana
By the 1580s the Spanish search had moved to a third location: the Guianan highlands east of the Orinoco, where Antonio de Berrío (1527-1597), the son-in-law and heir of Jiménez de Quesada, was conducting expeditions on the strength of indigenous reports of a great lake called Manoa. Berrío made three entradas between 1584 and 1591, found no city, founded San José de Oruña on Trinidad on his third attempt, and gathered a body of testimony about a kingdom in the interior that he transmitted in long letters to Spain. It was Berrío who eventually transmitted the legend to its most consequential English audience.
The Discoverie of Guiana, 1595-1596
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), out of favor at the court of Elizabeth I, sailed for Trinidad in February 1595 with four ships and about a hundred and fifty men. On 4 April 1595 he captured San José de Oruña and Berrío with it; from Berrío he learned, or claimed to learn, the location of Manoa. With about a hundred men in shallow vessels he ascended the Orinoco from 15 April, reached the territory of the Pemon and the Warao, established an alliance with the chieftain Topiawari, sighted Mount Roraima, and turned back without engaging the Guianan highlands. He found no gold mine. He returned to England in late August 1595 and the next year published The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa, which the Spaniards Call El Dorado, the book that fixed the El Dorado legend in English [5]. The book is part travel narrative, part political pamphlet for an English claim to the Orinoco basin, and part deliberate exaggeration. Modern editors generally agree Raleigh saw what he reports seeing. They also agree he did not see Manoa. His second expedition, in 1617-1618, ended in his son Walter’s death at Santo Tomé, his lieutenant Lawrence Keymis’s suicide, and Raleigh’s own execution at Westminster on 29 October 1618.
Draining the Lake: The Long Pursuit at Guatavita
While the entradas chased a kingdom that did not exist, the original lake was being drained, repeatedly, by parties who had read the chronicles correctly enough to know where the rite had been performed. The drainage history of Guatavita is the most directly evidentiary part of the El Dorado record because it has produced, in fragments and across centuries, the actual offerings the Muisca had made.
From Lázaro Fonte to Antonio de Sepúlveda
The first attempt to drain the lake came in 1545 under Lázaro Fonte and Hernán Pérez de Quesada, brother of Jiménez de Quesada. Using a bucket chain of indigenous laborers they lowered the water level approximately three meters and recovered a quantity of gold ornaments, including pieces sent to Charles V. The substantial assault came in the 1580s. The Bogotá merchant Antonio de Sepúlveda, working under royal license, mobilized as many as eight thousand indigenous laborers to cut a notch in the lake’s crater rim, intending to drain the basin entirely. The notch worked at first, dropping the water level by an estimated twenty meters and exposing offerings that yielded enough gold for Sepúlveda to send a substantial royal fifth to Philip II. The cut then collapsed, killing many of the laborers, and a landslide blocked the channel; the lake refilled. Sepúlveda is reported in the chronicles of Pedro Simón and Juan Rodríguez Freyle, and his license is preserved in the Spanish colonial archives [1].
Humboldt at Guatavita, 1801
In 1801 Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), traveling through the viceroyalty of New Granada with Aimé Bonpland, visited Guatavita and produced the most consequential reframing of the legend in three centuries. Humboldt did not believe in a city of gold. He read the rite as a Muisca religious ceremony of return, a votive deposition rather than a treasury, and located the historical El Dorado precisely where the rite had been performed. He estimated, by a method he himself acknowledged as crude, that if a thousand Muisca had each thrown five gold offerings into the lake annually for a century, several million pesos’ worth of gold remained submerged in the basin. The figure was widely cited and probably high; the principle behind it, that the El Dorado kernel was a religious practice at a known location rather than a lost city in the rainforest, was sound. Humboldt’s framing returned the legend to Guatavita and to the Muisca, where it had begun [6].
The 1898 Company and the 1965 Decree
In 1898 a London consortium called The Company for the Exploitation of the Lagoon of Guatavita, organized by the British engineer Hartley Knowles, succeeded where Sepúlveda had not. They drove a tunnel into the lake bed, drained the basin almost entirely, and exposed the lake floor, only to find it covered in liquid mud that hardened in the sun before the recovery teams could work it. The expedition recovered some gold, sold a portion at Sotheby’s in London in 1909, and bankrupted itself. In 1965 the Colombian government, under Decreto 1751, designated Lake Guatavita a national patrimonial site and prohibited further drainage, dredging, or recovery. The lake remains protected. What it still holds beneath its restored water level is, by deliberate national policy, no longer a question one is permitted to answer.
Modern Scholarship and What the Search Was About
The Spanish archaeologist José Pérez de Barradas (1897-1981), working in Colombia from the 1930s, produced the first systematic catalog of Muisca goldwork in the four-volume Orfebrería prehispánica de Colombia (1954-1966), which classified Muisca votive figures and tumbaga work by typology and provenance. Pérez de Barradas situated the El Dorado rite within a wider Andean tradition of ritual gold deposition and removed it from the older European frame of “lost treasure.” His catalog remains a standard reference in the museum literature [2]. The historiographic frame within which all of these chronicles are now read owes much to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, whose How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford University Press, 2001) traces how eighteenth-century European historians dismissed Iberian colonial chronicles and Mesoamerican indigenous testimony as untrustworthy in favor of conjectural Enlightenment history [7]. Applied to the El Dorado record, his argument suggests the legend’s persistence in European imagination had less to do with the original Muisca rite than with successive layers of European epistemological framing: what counted as testimony, what counted as a city, what counted as proof.
The interpretive frames matter because they explain what the search was actually about. To the Muisca the rite was a return of gold to a sun deity in a sacred lake. To the first conquistadors who heard the rite described, it was the seal of a wealthy chieftain whose hoard could be located. To the Castellanos and Cieza chronicles of the 1540s, it was the seal of a kingdom. To Berrío it was a city in the Guianan highlands. To Raleigh it was Manoa. To Humboldt it was a religious practice at a known lake. To Pérez de Barradas and modern Colombian archaeology it is a documented Andean ritual practice that produced an extensive corpus of votive metalwork now housed in the Museo del Oro. Each frame produced different actions: an investiture, a looting, a chronicle, a published exaggeration, a calculated estimate, a museum catalog. None of the frames is wholly false. They are different translations of an event that the original participants understood as the disposal, not the preservation, of wealth.
What the Record Will Not Tell Us
Several questions remain genuinely open. The total mass of gold deposited in Guatavita over the centuries of Muisca practice cannot be calculated; Humboldt’s estimate is a placeholder, not a measurement, and the 1898 drainage recovered only what lay in the surface mud. The transmission chain through which the original Muisca term, the rite of the gilded one, became the Spanish toponym el dorado remains imperfectly reconstructed; the indigenous interlocutors whose phrasing began the drift are largely anonymous. Whether the Muisca raft from Pasca depicts the Guatavita rite specifically or a related ceremony at one of the several other Muisca sacred lakes is contested. And the precise route Lope de Aguirre took from the upper Amazon to the Atlantic, by the Amazon proper or by the Casiquiare to the Orinoco, has never been established beyond his own contradictory testimony. What the record does establish, beyond reasonable dispute, is that El Dorado began as a person, became a place, became a kingdom, and ended in the historical imagination as a lost civilization. The civilization was never lost. It was given a new name and its goldsmiths’ work was sent abroad.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does El Dorado mean?
El Dorado is Spanish for “the gilded one.” The phrase originally referred to a single Muisca chieftain who, on his investiture as zipa, was coated in gold dust on a raft at Lake Guatavita and threw the dust into the lake as an offering. By the late 1530s the phrase had drifted from a person to a place where the rite was performed; by the 1540s to a kingdom; by the 1590s, in Walter Raleigh’s English usage, to a city of gold called Manoa.
Where was the original El Dorado?
The original rite was performed at Lake Guatavita, a circular crater lake about thirty-five miles northeast of present-day Bogotá, Colombia, by the Muisca polity of the Cundinamarca highlands. The lake was repeatedly drained between the 1540s and 1898 in attempts to recover the votive gold; in 1965 the Colombian government designated it a protected national site and ended further dredging.
Who was Sebastián de Belalcázar?
Sebastián de Belalcázar (c. 1480-1551) was a Spanish conquistador and former lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro who marched north from Quito in 1535 in pursuit of el indio dorado, the gilded Indian. His treasurer Gonzalo de la Peña recorded “a land called el dorado” in the expedition’s accounts in 1539, the first appearance of the phrase as a place name. Belalcázar reached the Muisca highlands the same year and met Quesada and Federmann at Bacatá; the three jointly founded Bogotá on 29 April 1539.
Did Gonzalo Pizarro find El Dorado?
No. Gonzalo Pizarro (c. 1510-1548) departed Quito in February 1541 with about two hundred and twenty Spaniards and four thousand indigenous porters in search of Omagua and the Land of Cinnamon. Within months most of the porters and Spaniards were dead; Pizarro walked back to Quito barefoot. His lieutenant Francisco de Orellana, sent for provisions, descended the current to the Atlantic and on 24 August 1542 reached the mouth of what would be named the Amazon, the first European descent of the river.
What did Walter Raleigh actually find in 1595?
Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) ascended the Orinoco River in spring 1595, established alliances with the Pemon chieftain Topiawari, sighted Mount Roraima, and returned without engaging the Guianan highlands. He found no city of gold. The next year he published The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), which fixed the El Dorado legend in English. His 1617-1618 return ended in his son’s death, his lieutenant Keymis’s suicide, and Raleigh’s own execution at Westminster on 29 October 1618.
Who was Lope de Aguirre?
Lope de Aguirre (c. 1510-1561) was a Basque soldier in the 1559-1561 Pedro de Ursúa expedition into the Amazon in search of Omagua. On 1 January 1561 Aguirre led a mutiny that killed Ursúa, declared a creole rebellion against Castile, and led survivors to the Atlantic. He took the island of Margarita and was killed at Barquisimeto, Venezuela, on 27 October 1561.
What is the Muisca raft?
The Muisca raft is a small tumbaga (gold-silver-copper alloy) votive object found in 1969 by Cruz María Dimaté in the La Campana cave at Pasca, Colombia. About nineteen and a half centimeters long, it depicts eleven figures on an oval reed raft (a central seated chief surrounded by attendants and oarsmen) and is dated by associated charcoal to between 1295 and 1410 CE. It is now held at the Museo del Oro in Bogotá and is read as a depiction of the El Dorado investiture rite at Lake Guatavita.
How did Humboldt change the El Dorado story?
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) visited Guatavita in 1801 with Aimé Bonpland and reframed El Dorado as a Muisca religious ceremony of votive return rather than a lost city. He estimated, by an admittedly crude method, that several million pesos in gold remained in the lake; the figure was inflated, but the principle, that the legend’s kernel was a documented rite at a known location rather than a kingdom in the rainforest, was sound. The Muisca rite became, again, the historical center of the legend.
Was Lake Guatavita ever drained?
Yes, repeatedly. Lázaro Fonte and Hernán Pérez de Quesada lowered the lake about three meters with bucket chains in 1545. Antonio de Sepúlveda cut a notch in the crater rim in the 1580s, dropped the lake by some twenty meters, and recovered substantial gold for Philip II before the cut collapsed and refilled the basin. In 1898 a British consortium under Hartley Knowles drained the lake almost entirely but found the floor covered in liquid mud that hardened in the sun. In 1965 the Colombian government protected the site under Decreto 1751.
Where can the search for El Dorado be studied today?
The Muisca raft and the principal corpus of Muisca votive metalwork are at the Museo del Oro in Bogotá. The Spanish chronicles of Pedro Simón, Juan Rodríguez Freyle, Juan de Castellanos, and Pedro Cieza de León survive at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. José Pérez de Barradas’s Orfebrería prehispánica de Colombia (1954-1966) and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, 2001) are the standard modern entry points. Raleigh’s Discoverie (1596) is in the British Library and digitized by Project Gutenberg.
