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I must confess that part of my motivation for this post is an undying fascination with the exotic and mysterious. I first heard of El Dorado as a teenager, when I watched the cartoon movie, The Road to El Dorado, and for a time, I wondered very much if such a city really existed. It was a city believed to be made completely of gold. A few times every year, there would be a ceremony where the natives would coat their chief with gold dust and he would make offerings on their behalf to the gods by throwing gold and jewels into a lake.

Fascinating is it not? To have so much gold to throw into the lake and so much wealth… the idea of boundless gold captured the imagination of the public and the western explorers of the 1500s. In the hope of striking rich, many people have risked their lives to find this legendary city of gold.

Historically, the term El Dorado, refers to a person—el hombre dorado—not a city. It means the Golden Man. The tale of the golden man and the ceremony of throwing gold into the lake was first recorded by a Spanish Monk by the name of Pedro Simón. However, this was fairly late as by the early 1500s, the Spanish were already robbing the Indians in the New World. Large amounts of gold were stolen from the Incas of Peru and the Aztecs in Mexico.

Imagine when word of a city of gold got out, teams of explorers were just racing to get to all that gold first. There were three initial teams of explorers and they all endured terrible hardships that included falling ill to diseases from mosquito bites, snake bites, dangerous animals and Indians with arrows coated with poison. The rain, which never seemed to end, also caused their clothes to rot away. The first team took 10 months to reach Lake Guatavitá, the lake the chief of El Dorado was believed have held his gold-throwing ceremony, and only 166 people were left alive out of 700 who set out on the journey.

There was no city of gold. There was some gold dust and emeralds in the Lake Guatavitá, but not enough to justify all the hard work getting to the place and the lost of lives. When they discovered there was no city of gold at Lake Guatavitá, the teams tried to look elsewhere. Some thought the city was in Venezuela but that too turned out to be false. More and more teams tried to look for the city in the 50 years that followed but none came back with gold and most were fortunate if they even got back alive.

Not too long ago in 1965, after a few attempts of trying to drain the Lake Guatavitá to retrieve any gold that may be at the bottom of it (one company did manage to drain the lake and find a few golden ornaments), Colombia turned the lake into a historical site and henceforth, all efforts to find the treasure of the Golden Man became banned.

Does the city exist? To read the full version of this story, you can check out this book from the library,

Image retrieved from www.amazon.ca

Legends or Lies by Gary L. Blackwood
Publisher: New York : Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, c2005
Call Number: J English 398.2 BLA -[FOL]

Reference:
Blackwood, G. L. (2005). The City of Gold. Legends or Lies. New York : Marshall Cavendish Benchmark

If you want to read more about El Dorado and Lost Cities, here are books you can check out at our libraries.

For Teens & Children:

Image retrieved from www.amazon.co.uk

Lost cities by Sue Hamilton
Publisher: Edina, Minn. : ABDO Pub. Co., c2008
Call Number: Y English 398.234 HAM

Image retrieved from www.amazon.ca

Cities of the dead: finding lost civilizations by Denise Rinaldo
Publisher: New York : Franklin Watts, c2008
Call Number: Y English 930.1 RIN

Image retrieved from www.amazon.ca

Lost cities by Neil Morris
Publisher: London : Franklin Watts, 2007
Call Number: J English 930.1 MOR

All websites are last accessed on 18 August 2008. Please refer to the terms and conditions on the homepages for use.
For the availability of the above book titles, please check the library catalogue.

Answered by Felicia Chan,

Librarian, Children’s Services