The Ever-Changing Mythology of the City of Gold
The mythology and legend of El Dorado seems to have changed like a message in a game of telephone. It gradually got altered with each repetition, until the final recipient ended up with information completely different than that at the start of the transmission. It began with the first Spaniards who came in contact with the native Muisca people, in today’s Colombia. They heard a tale of about chiefs who coated themselves in gold dust, then rowed into Lake Guatavita, about 35 miles northeast of modern Bogota, to drop golden gifts for the water god.
The first Spaniards to hear the tale named such Muisca chiefs of mythology El Hombre Dorado, Spanish for “the golden man”. Over the years, and with repeated retellings, El Hombre Dorado was transformed. What began as a tribal chief coated in gold dust became a city made of gold, then a kingdom of gold, and finally a fabulously wealthy empire that had more gold than the rest of the world put together. The story was helped by the fact that Spaniards and other Europeans had encountered a lot of gold among the natives of the Caribbean coast of South of America. So they reasoned that there must be a huge source of gold somewhere in the interior.