El Dorado

Nationality/Culture

Spanish/Muisca

Pronunciation

el doh-RAH-doh

Alternate Names

None

Appears In

Juan Rodriguez Freyle's El Carnero

Myth Overview

The legend of El Dorado (pronounced el doh-RAH-doh) was about a fabulously wealthy city of gold and the king who ruled over it. The story sprang up shortly after the first Spanish explorers landed in Central and South America.

Local people told tales of a rich king who plastered his body with gold dust and then dived into a sacred lake to wash it off. Afterward, he would toss gold into the lake as an offering to the gods. The Spanish called the king El Dorado—The Gilded One—because his body was gilded, or covered in gold. As the tale spread, the city he ruled came to be called El Dorado. Eventually, the meaning of the name changed to include any mythical region that contained great riches.

An early version of the El Dorado legend placed the city near Lake Guatavita, a circular lake formed in a volcanic crater not too far from modern Bogota, Colombia. The story was based on the Muisca people who performed a ceremony similar to that in the legend. The Muisca king, covered with gold dust, boarded a raft in the lake and made offerings to the gods. Both Spaniards and Germans searched the region in 1538 but failed to find El Dorado. They even attempted to drain the lake in an effort to locate gold; today, Lake Guatavita still bears a deep groove along its crater rim that was cut by Spanish explorers.

El Dorado in Context

One of the reasons Spanish explorers aimed to conquer the Americas was to find new sources of wealth—specifically, gold. The myth of El Dorado appealed strongly to these Spanish explorers because it played into their desire to locate untold riches and claim it for their country (and themselves).

Local inhabitants usually claimed that El Dorado was somewhere far away in the hope that the Europeans would search elsewhere and leave them in peace. Men as famous as English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) spent years in South America looking for legendary golden cities such as Manoa and Omagua. Other places mentioned in stories were Paititi, a land of gold located in Paraguay, and the City of the Caesars, an invisible golden city in Chile. Several bloody expeditions were launched to find these imaginary kingdoms. One of the most tragic was led by a rebel soldier named Lope de Aguirre, a brutal madman who proclaimed himself king and was murdered by one of his followers.

Key Themes and Symbols

The myth of El Dorado symbolized riches beyond imagining to Spanish explorers. The idea of a place where gold was so common that it could be tossed into a lake also represents the way different cultures viewed wealth, and what is considered precious. Also contained within the myth is the underlying notion that Native Americans were too uncivilized to understand or appreciate the value of their resources; this was often used as a justification for conquering native tribes throughout the Americas.

El Dorado in Art, Literature, and Everyday Life

El Dorado was such an appealing myth to Europeans that it made its way into literature. In Candide, a 1759 novel by the French writer Voltaire, the main character accidentally discovers the rich city. Edgar Allan Poe's poem “Eldorado” refers to the legend, as does Paradise Lost by English poet John Milton. More recently, the myth of El Dorado was the basis of the 2000 Dreamworks animated film The Road to El Dorado, featuring voice work by Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh.

Today, the term “El Dorado” is often used to refer to a mythical place of untold riches. Several cities and towns in the United States have used the name, and Cadillac has even named one of its cars the Eldorado.

Read, Write, Think, Discuss

Mythical places such as El Dorado usually offer something that cannot be found in the real world. For El Dorado, it is untold wealth; for the mythical Buddhist city of Shambhala (renamed Shangri-La in a 1933 British novel called Lost Horizons), it is perfect peace and harmony. To the Arawak Indians, the mythical land of Beemeenee offered eternal youth. If you could journey to a mythical land that offered something not available in the real world, what one thing would you like to find there? Why?