THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
El Dorado began as a man. Entering the Colombian highlands in the 1530s, the Spanish heard that each new ruler of the Muisca was initiated at the sacred lake of Guatavita: stripped, coated in resin and powdered gold, he was floated to the centre of the lake on a raft heaped with gold and emeralds, sank the offerings, then plunged in to wash the gold away. He was el hombre dorado, the gilded man. The chronicler Juan Rodríguez Freyle left the fullest account of the rite in El Carnero (1636), and the Muisca gold raft in Bogotá's Museo del Oro, dated between roughly 600 and 1600 CE, is taken as its material echo.
Retelling inflated the gilded man into a golden city, then a golden kingdom called Manoa. Jiménez de Quesada conquered the Muisca in 1536-38; Gonzalo Pizarro marched east from Quito in 1541, and his lieutenant Orellana, carried downstream, completed the first descent of the Amazon; Walter Raleigh ascended the Orinoco in 1595 hunting Manoa on the shores of Lake Parime and published The Discoverie of Guiana, a quest he resumed in 1617; his son was killed early in 1618 when his men stormed the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé, and the failure cost Raleigh his own head. Lake Guatavita itself was repeatedly cut and drained by treasure hunters; the notch sliced into its rim by Antonio de Sepúlveda in the 1580s is still visible.
Lake Parime lingered on maps for two centuries until Humboldt's fieldwork removed it in the early 1800s. The name El Dorado survived as a common noun for any dream of gold.
