A-one, two, three... (Intro to "It's Tough To Be A God" from The Road to El Dorado) El Dorado, baby! The lost city of gold! Adventure in the jungle! Treasure and puzzles and maps and uncharted and EVERYBODY loves El Dorado, all right? Where Atlantis has a narrative downside of being, at minimum, under 5 million tons of freezing saltwater... El Dorado is the kind of ancient lost city that has zero drawbacks. An unspoiled ruin buried in the verdant jungle, full to bursting with treasures and gold and archaeologically significant historical relics! If you're a thrill-seeking adventurer, it'd be the quest of a lifetime. If you're a researcher, it'd provide a uniquely unspoiled window into a pre-Spanish Mesoamerican civilization. And if you're anyone else, well... ...who doesn't love a city filled with more gold than you could ever possibly spend? Basically, El Dorado is more than just the archetypal lost city of gold. It's the most beautiful fiction I've ever seen. And the best part is, it's ENTIRELY the conquistadors' fault. El Dorado is pure uncut wishful thinking and the history of the legend is an absolute trip. To start with, let's go all the way back to that mythical era of 1536! When, just a few decades after the invasion of the New World, the Spanish conquistadors hear a local legend of a king who covers himself in gold dust as an offering to the gods. This legend is called "El Hombre Dorado" or "The Golden Man". And the conquistadors are very interested. In pursuit of this legend, the conquistadors end up finding the Muisca people, a thriving loose confederation located in modern-day Colombia and ruled by a system of three distinct leaders: a zipa, a zaque, and an iraca. The zipa and zaque weren't exactly kings as neither one of them held absolute power, but each ruled over a separate part of the Muisca and they were pretty revered. The iraca, meanwhile, was both a political leader and a religious one, and lived in the sun temple in Sugamuxi. The area they lived in was naturally rich in emeralds, but they also had a ton of gold they'd imported, and that gold played a major role in the inauguration of a new zipa. Fun fact: The Muisca line of succession wasn't patrilineal. The title of zaque and zipa instead passed to the predecessor's nephew: the oldest son of their oldest sister. Now, when a new zipa was crowned, he would be covered in gold dust and then jump into the center of the nearby lake Guatavita, washing off the gold as an offering to ChĂa, the moon goddess. Along with the gold dust, gold trinkets and artifacts were also thrown into Lake Guatavita as part of the ceremony. Now, learning that this extremely profitable legend of the golden man was both true and within reach, the conquistadors did their thing– conquering the Muisca and enslaving their people in work camps called encomiendas. The conquistadors had really gotten this down to a science at this point, they'd been doing it for a while. And they seized an awful lot of gold. So...that's it, right? They found "El Hombre Dorado" and claimed all the gold. Happy ending, right? Well, that's the trick, isn't it? It wasn't enough gold. See, here's the funny thing about gold, right? It's pretty much useless except as a currency and as a decoration. It's soft, it's heavy, it's useless for weapons or armor, and, unless you're making a circuit board, there are better metals for basically every possible use. Now the Spanish were all about gold as currency. But the Muisca people, and almost every other Central and South American civilization, didn't have money-based economies. It was all about the barter, baby. So without using gold as coin, the only other use they had for it was decorative. Jewelry, sculpture, stuff like that. And as a non-corrosive metal, there's no better choice if you're looking for stuff to throw in a lake without ruining it. But put yourself into the mind of a conquistador for a minute. To you, gold is everything. It's money. And money means power, and fame, and a hero's welcome back in Spain, and everything you could ever want. And these people are just parading around in the streets wearing your entire annual salary and not even noticing! There are two conclusions you can draw with what's going on. Door #1: The Muisca don't assign the same value to gold as we do. And since their economy is entirely trade-based with no currency as a middleman, they have no other use for gold than jewelry and art. They use it for display because it's sparkly and it doesn't corrode, and that's all that matters when you're not assigning it an artificial social value. Door #2: THESE SAVAGES MUST HAVE SO MUCH GOLD SQUIRRELED AWAY SOMEWHERE THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO JUST PARADE AROUND IN IT LIKE IT'S NOTHING AND THAT MEANS THE REAL MOTHERLOAD HAS TO BE HIDDEN SOMEWHERE ELSE! Now, we also need to remember that the conquistadors were not just a random assortment of fun loving Spaniards from all walks of life The people who chose to become conquistadors were people who wanted to conquer, enslave, and steal gold and silver from this brave new world so they could return to Spain grotesquely rich. This is, one could say, a selection pressure that's likely to produce a population of conquistadors that are overall much more inclined to kick down door number 2 than to ponder the anthropological possibilites of door number 1. They'd found "El Hombre Dorado", the golden man, they'd found a lake full of sacrificed gold, and guess what, it wasn't enough. It was time to shorten the name and start looking for El Dorado, the city of gold... or literally just "the gold", which is honestly more on the nose. Before we move on to that hot mess, I wanna put a bit of a spotlight on what happened with Lake Guatavita, because it's kind of hilarious. So, the Zipa coronation ceremonies unsurprisingly left the lake pretty full of shiny golden artifacts, and the conquistadors wanted it, but lake dredging technology wasn't exactly peaking in 1540, so the process wasn't easy. In 1545, two conquistadors attempted to manually lower the water level with a bucket chain that took three months and only lowered the water level by 10 feet. But they did pull out $100,000 worth of gold by today's standards, so that's nothing to sneeze at, I guess. More than I get out of my swimming trips, anyway. Then again in 1580, an entrepreneur named Antonio de Sepulveda set up a workforce to dig a huge notch into the side of the lake, lowering the water level by 65 feet and retrieving $300,000 worth of gold before the notch collapsed and killed all his workers. Somehow, he managed to die broke. Things then stagnated for a bit until 1898, when a British-controlled company, creatively titled "The Company for the Exploitation of the Lagoon of Guatavita", set up a huge pump that drained the entire lake down to 4 feet of muck and slime, which hardened into concrete under the sun, rendering almost all the gold totally irretrievable. They dredged up a small amount of gold, under $80,000 by today's standards, and went bankrupt shortly thereafter. Gee, it's almost like this place is deeply sacred somehow, and f*cking with it is asking for trouble. Anyway, it's been a protected site since 1965, so don't go getting any ideas. So anyway, with a meager absolute f*ckton of gold in Lake Guatavita and no gold-paved streets in sight, the conquistadors started looking around for the REAL gold motherload, El Dorado. And in the process, things got pretty crazy. In 1539, for example, the conquistadors got word of something called the Seven Cities of Gold, seven wealthy pueblos located in what is now the Arizona desert. Chasing these rumors, the conquistadors found a handful of nice small towns, but no gold, silver, or turquoise among them, so they just conquered the place, enslaved all the locals, and set themselves up as the local government, like you do. In 1541, conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, the younger half brother to Francisco Pizarro, who toppled the Incan empire, hears a story from the locals about a valley to the east full of gold and cinnamon. Gonzalo organizes a huge expedition of 340 conquistadors and 4000-ish locals, and they don't find a valley and a whole bunch of them die. When the expedition is forced to turn back, Gonzalo sends his buddy Francisco de Orellana to keep looking for this valley, and while he doesn't find El Dorado, he does find the Amazon River, which he names the Amazon after getting his ass kicked by a gang of warrior women. Very appropriate. In 1560, a group of about 300 conquistadors are led by Pedro de Ursua in an alleged search for El Dorado, but this is actually a front for his real motive, which is to get rid of them. They're all veterans of the Incan conquest with nothing to do but stir up trouble, so he's just trying to keep them from breaking anything important by getting them as far away as possible. Unfortunately, he's killed by his second in command, conquistador Lope de Aguirre, and the gang then marauds their way to the coast, ravaging native villages wherever they go. I'm telling ya, I'm shocked that the conquistadors would be so backstabbing and recklessly destructive to the native population. They just seemed so nice up until now. Things take a bit of a turn in 1595, when an Englishman gets in on the action. One Sir Walter Raleigh, who's hell bent on finding El Dorado, because– Uh, hold on, I think I've got this written down– Uh, okay, because he heard of an account allegedly from a guy named Juan Martinez, who has no record of existing but was most likely based on a real guy named Juan MartĂn de Abujar, and Juan Martinez has supposedly been part of an expedition to find El Dorado being led by conquistador Diego de Ordaz, but Diego de Ordaz's expedition had happened in like 1529, and he also died in 1532, and Juan Martinez supposedly had this happen to him in 1570, so the writer probably got Diego de Ordaz confused with a different conquistador, Pedro Maraver de Silva, who did search for El Dorado around 1568, and did have Juan MartĂn de Abujar on his crew, but whatever. So this Juan Martinez, who participated in the search for El Dorado with Diego de Ordaz, 40 years after Diego de Ordaz died, THIS guy was captured by natives and taken to El Dorado and saw the streets all paved with gold and stuff, and HE says that El Dorado is totally real. That's the story that made Sir Walter Raleigh go, "I've never heard anything more legit in my entire life, let's go!" It's all a bit Don Quixote, but whatever, let's roll with it. So not only is Sir Walter Raleigh on the hunt for El Dorado, he's really serious about it, and is also a complete mess. He straight up kidnaps a conquistador, Antonio de Berrio, to guide him around, before ditching him. But it doesn't stop there, oh no. Sir Raleigh has a LOT of ideas about El Dorado. For instance, he's decided it's actually a city called Manoa, and it's on the banks of a Lake Parime. Because that actual gold-filled empire with a sacred gold-filled lake wasn't good enough for him, he decided he wanted to start making up names. And he also wants to claim El Dorado for ENGLAND, and use it as a foothold for a colony to muscle the Spaniards out of South America and get all that sweet, sweet, New World money for himself. Pretty intricate plan. Only one small problem: El Dorado wasn't cooperating. Raleigh couldn't find it. And while later explorers and cartographers would haphazardly throw Manoa and Lake Parime onto their maps of South America, under the assumption that they were probably in there somewhere, there was never any evidence that either place existed. I will say this for them, though: if it wasn't for all those hunts for El Dorado, our maps of South America would probably be a lot less comprehensive. Nothing gets the cartographers out in force quite like the promise of a secret lost city. Anyway, in 1616, Sir Walter Raleigh, now old and grody, returns to the New World to renew the hunt for El Dorado and immediately ransacks a Spanish outpost, getting his son and his lieutenant killed, and incidentally also violating a 1604 treaty with Spain, which leads to King James executing him to avoid an international incident. "Mmm, good show, sir. Bully for you." People continue regularly going on perilous expeditions looking for El Dorado, or Lake Parime, and keep turning up empty, and in a few noteworthy cases, a local comes running, telling the governing conquistadors they've super found silver or gold in the rocks in some dangerous faraway location, and the expedition always goes haring off at top speed, and they always turn up empty, and also usually die, and amazingly, they still keep falling for it. I feel like the third time I got bricked into my own basement, I would stop falling for the Amontillado gambit. Also, as an extra bit of spectacularly entertaining stupidity, the conquistadors regularly turned up large amounts of platinum while searching for gold, but dismissed it as junk, calling it "unripe silver", which is literally what platinum means. The locals had been working with it for ages, since it shares a lot of properties with gold, like being almost totally uncorrodable and relatively easy to work. And they had a lot of finely worked platinum ornaments that were literally completely unique to the region. See, ironically, the conquistadors didn't recognize its value because platinum is so rare, and at this point the conquistadors didn't know it existed. They were literally pulling out nuggets of the rarest precious metal on earth and dumping it as scrap because it wasn't yellow. And if you think that's bad, Spain later had a small problem where people were using platinum to counterfeit gold coins, since they were similar in weight and softness, and Spain responded to this financial crisis by DUMPING THEIR ENTIRE NATIONAL PLATINUM SUPPLY INTO THE OCEAN. This whole debacle is such an incredibly apt metaphor for the flaws inherent in the colonial system and how the lust for gold literally blinded them to the true unique value of the New World that if I'd read it in a book I would have called the writer a hack. "OH, the colonizers dismiss the incredibly valuable and unique resource of the colony as worthless scrap because they're too busy digging for their own personal currency they've arbitrarily assigned value to? Yeah, nice, and I bet the real treasure was the friends they made along the way, right?" I swear, nothing owns colonial Spain harder than it owned itself. Anyway, the passion for the El Dorado search was already starting to die down only a couple centuries after it first came up. In 1743, French explorer and mathematician Charles Marie de la Condamine mapped the Amazon and many of its tributaries, and later wrote that he found no sign of any El Dorado, and that the story was most likely the result of greedy conquistadors really wanting to hear that there was a magical city of gold they hadn't plundered yet, and desparate locals really wanting to get rid of these goddamn Spaniards, sending them off on a wild goose chase just to get rid of them. A very bad combination–or a very good one, depending on your perspective. By the 1800s, El Dorado was basically accepted as fiction, that if it were out there, someone would have found it by now, and that the only reason anyone had ever thought it was real was simple wishful thinking with no factual basis. It would be cool if El Dorado was real. I personally think there's a serious lack of cool unexplored things to discover in this day and age of precise satellite imaging and accurate world maps and stuff. But El Dorado is more of a cautionary tale than anything else. It's theoretically rewarding enough to make you wish it were real. It's just plausible enough to make you seriously entertain the possibility that it could be real. And most importantly, it's such a high bar that no matter what incredibly cool stuff you happen to find while searching for it, it'll never feel like what you're looking for. The conquistadors found a vastly wealthy empire that dumped gold into its own lake every few decades, and it wasn't El Dorado-y enough for them. It was never going to be enough. As the search dragged on, and it became more and more obvious that the only El Dorado they'd ever hope to find would be completely overgrown ruins, or just a random lake, the appeal withered away. If it's not enough gold, it's not El Dorado and they had to keep looking. And that's the fun thing about greed. It was never gonna be enough gold. El Dorado is that rare myth constructed from nothing but wishful thinking. No deeper origin, no kernel of truth, just a lot of very greedy people eating themselves alive, trying to find the one thing that'd finally satisfy that hunger Maybe they should have tried friendship. I've heard it's the greatest treasure of all. *Red singing Money (That's What I Want)*
We need to conquer El Platino now. At least for this one there's historical precedent
That was pure gold.