Guatavita, Colombia: The Real El Dorado

In the upper mountains of Cundinamarca, just an hour's drive from Bogotá, there's a place of myth and ancient tales. You have heard about it, that is for sure: the legend of El Dorado. A lake littered with gold and precious stones. Could it be true? Shouldn't such a place be looted by now? How would that even be possible? The answers are yes, sort of, and...let me tell you the story.

Many moons ago in the region known as Guatavita lived a wealthy tribe, part of the Muisca people. The tribe's chief or Cacique would take the name Guatavita for himself as representative of his people. The Muisca people were highly skilled at mining and crafting gold. Gold was not currency; it had a much more critical role. Because it shined brightly in the same warm tones as the sunlight, it was assumed to be the reminder left by the sun god Suá (or Zhuá) for mortals to offer as a tribute. Humanity's responsibility was to dig the gold, shape it into beautiful objects representing the many deities, or into elaborated golden plates and jewelry to adorn the people's bodies to show that they were proud children of the Sun. Once a year, the tribe would take every single golden piece they had accumulated and bring it to the edge of the Guatavita Lagoon. There, a raft awaited, the priests of the tribe collecting the people's treasures. The Cacique then appeared, naked but painted in golden dust. He would get on the raft and be taken to the middle of the Lagoon. As they sailed, the priests threw the treasures into the lake. Finally, the Cacique would submerge his golden body in the water. The Lagoon body was the body of the goddess Chie, the deity of the moon and the waters. She was the Sun's wife and, as such, would receive the tributes in his name.

And so pounds and pounds of gold filled the belly of the goddess year after year. When the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in the 1500s, they heard the stories and went wild. They found these "savage" people, almost naked but for the golden adornments hanging from every part of their bodies. The natives were pillaged, raped, and massacred for their gold. Then the frenzy to retrieve the gold from the lake begun. The first effort was an old fashioned bucket chain that lowered the water level enough to find a few hundred pieces by the edge of the lake, but the craving for the big jackpot at the bottom continued. There are rumors of another effort to drain the waters by channeling them away, resulting in many workers' deaths. A British Company then made a final attempt in the late 1800s. They managed to lower the lagoon level almost to its bottom, but that left a thick mess: several feet of unnavigable mud. The Sun then baked the soil into stone, sealing its treasure forever. The company went bankrupt in this effort. The gods refused to relinquish their treasures. Nowadays, the Colombian government has forbidden any attempt at mining the Lagoon. It is now a natural reserve for hikers.

The old village of Guatavita was flooded in the 1960s to create a water reserve and replaced by a picturesque town of the same name, build in the Colonial style. It is mainly a place for tourism, where you can find hostels to stay, hike the famed Lagoon's surroundings, and even more, find dozens of small marine fossils. That's right, way before the Muisca people inhabited this land, it was an ocean, and you can see relics of that time just by keeping an eye on the ground you step on. So it's not only El Dorado that you will find there: there are all kinds of natural treasures in this area for you to enjoy.