El Dorado has been associated with our Guyana for so long, that we tend to think that the myth originated here. It didn’t – and it isn’t exactly a myth either.
So where was the real El Dorado, and how did it come to settle in Guyana?
The Muisca were conquered by three conquistadors, two Spaniards – Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada top and Sebastián de Belalcázar – and one German, Nikolaus Federmann towards the end of the 1530s.
A Muisca gold model of the raft with El Dorado, other chiefs and gold offerings The Spaniards would have heard the local accounts of El Dorado (meaning ‘The Gilded One’). Every time a new ruler came to power in Muisca lands, he would cover himself in gold dust, and sail out to the middle of a lake to throw in offerings of gold and emeralds to the god who lived beneath its waters.The tradition had died out many, many years before the Spaniards showed their faces in Muisca country, but there were still a few Indians alive at the time of the conquest who had been present on the last occasion the rite was ever performed, and they described it. The stories of El Dorado filtered back to Quito, and from there they took on a life of their own. (Turn to page 18A)
