The real history behind El Dorado, the legendary city of gold

El Dorado, the legendary “lost city of gold” looms large in the world of legend. It has sparked lifelong quests, books, and films. But is El Dorado real?

The lust for gold spans all eras, races, and nationalities. To possess any amount of gold seems to ignite an insatiable desire to obtain more.

Through the centuries, this passion gave rise to the enduring tale of a place of immense wealth led by a ruler bathed in gold. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans believed this gilded city existed somewhere in the New World.

Their searches for El Dorado and its riches wasted countless lives, drove at least one man to suicide, and put another man under the executioner’s ax. But the mythical city has never been found.

“El Dorado shifted geographical locations until finally it simply meant a source of untold riches somewhere in the Americas,” says Jim Griffith, a folklorist in Tucson, Arizona.

Theories of El Dorado

The origins of El Dorado lie deep in South America. And like all enduring myths, the tale of the legendary city contains some scraps of truth.

When Spanish explorers reached South America in the early 16th century, they heard stories about a tribe of natives high in the Andes mountains in present day Colombia. When a new chieftain rose to power, his rule began with a ceremony at Lake Guatavita.

Accounts of the ceremony vary, but they consistently say the new ruler was covered with gold dust, and that gold and precious jewels were thrown into the lake to appease a god that lived underwater. The Spaniards started calling this golden chief Eldorado, “the gilded one.”

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The ceremony of the gilded man supposedly ended in the late 15th century when Eldorado and his subjects were conquered by another tribe. But the Spaniards and other Europeans had found so much gold among the natives along the continent’s northern coast that they believed there had to be a place of great wealth somewhere in the interior.

The Spaniards didn’t find this golden city, called El Dorado. However, they did find Lake Guatavita and tried to drain it in 1545. They lowered its level enough to find hundreds of pieces of gold along the lake’s edge. But the presumed fabulous treasure in the deeper water was beyond their reach.

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Petra, JordanA person standing in the doorway of the Monastery at Petra, Jordan, shows the enormity of the ancient building's entrance. Carved into the sandstone hill by the Nabataeans in the second century A.D., this towering structure, called El-Deir, may have been used as a church or monastery by later societies, but likely began as a temple.

Photograph by Martin Gray

Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition

Spanish conquistadores, including Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and Francisco de Orellana, as well as German explorer Philipp von Hutten launched expeditions to search for the golden city.

English courtier Sir Walter Raleigh made two trips to Guiana to search for El Dorado. During his second trip in 1617, he sent his son, Watt Raleigh, with an expedition up the Orinoco River. But Walter Raleigh, then an old man, stayed behind at a base camp on the island of Trinidad. The expedition was a disaster, and Watt Raleigh was killed in a battle with Spaniards.

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Eric Klingelhofer, an archaeologist at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, had looked for the site of Raleigh’s base camp on Trinidad. He says Walter Raleigh was so furious at the survivor who informed him of Watt’s death that he accused the survivor of letting his son be killed. “The man goes into his cabin on the ship and kills himself,” says Klingelhofer.

Raleigh returned to England, where King James ordered him beheaded for, among other things, disobeying orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish.

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El Dorado’s enduring impact

Today the elusive city bathed in gold continues to spark imaginations, from classic texts to modern-day films and video games.

The legend of El Dorado endures because “you want it to be true,” says Jose Oliver, a lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. “I don’t think we’ve ever stopped seeking El Dorado.”

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So where is this lost city of gold? In his 1849 poem “El Dorado,” writer Edgar Allan Poe offers an eerie and eloquent suggestion: “Over the Mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of the Shadow, ride, boldly ride … if you seek for [El Dorado].”