Legends Summarized: El Dorado

El Dorado, baby! The lost city of gold! Jungle adventure! Treasures, puzzles, cards, Uncharted and EVERYONE loves El Dorado, okay? Where Atlantis has the disadvantage of having less than 5 million tons of frozen salt water... El Dorado is the kind of ancient lost city that has no disadvantages. A pristine ruin buried in the green jungle, packed with treasure, gold and historical relics of archaeological significance! If you are an adventurer, this is the quest of a lifetime. If you are a researcher, it would provide you with an exceptionally pristine window into a pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilization. And if you're someone else, well, who doesn't love a city filled with more gold than you could ever spend?

In reality, El Dorado is more than the archetypal lost city of gold. It is the most beautiful fiction I have ever seen. And the best thing is that the fault lies entirely with the conquerors. El Dorado is pure unadulterated illusion, and the story of the legend is an absolute journey. To start, we go back to the mythical era of 1536! When, just a few decades after the invasion of the New World, the Spanish conquistadors hear a local legend about 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 search of this legend, the conquistadors eventually encounter the Muisca people, a prosperous loose confederation in modern-day Colombia governed by a system of three different leaders: a zipa, a zaque, and an iraca. The Zipa and the Zaque were not really kings, as neither had absolute power, but each ruled a separate part of the Muisca and were quite revered. The iraca, on the other hand, was both a political leader and a religious leader, and lived in the sun temple at Sugamuxi. The area where they lived was naturally rich in emeralds, but they had also imported a ton of gold, and that gold played an important role in the dedication of a new Zita.

Fun fact: the Muisca line of succession was not patrilineal. Instead, the title of zaque and zipa passed to the nephew of the predecessor: the eldest son of his eldest sister. Now, when a new zipa was crowned, they covered it with gold dust and then jumped into the middle of nearby Lake Guatavita, where they rinsed off the gold as an offering to Chía, the goddess of the moon. Along with the gold dust, gold trinkets and artifacts were also thrown into Lake Guatavita as part of the ceremony. When the conquistadors discovered that this profitable legend of the golden man was true and within their reach, they did their thing: they conquered the Muisca and enslaved their people in work camps called encomiendas.

The conquistadors really got this down to a science, they had been doing it for a while. And they seized a lot of gold. So... that's it, right? They found "The Golden Man" and claimed all the gold. Happy ending, right? Well, that's the point, isn't it? It wasn't enough gold. See, this is the funny thing about gold. It is practically useless except as currency and decoration. It's soft, heavy, useless for weapons or armor, and unless you're making a circuit board, there are better metals for every possible use. The Spanish were crazy about gold as a means of payment.

But the Muiscas, and almost all other civilizations in Central and South America, did not have a money-based economy. It was all about bartering, honey. So, without using gold as currency, the only other use they gave it was decorative. Jewelry, sculpture, that kind of thing. And as a non-corrosive metal, there's no better option if you're looking for things to throw in a lake without ruining it. But put yourself in the head of a conqueror. For you, gold is everything. It's money. And money means power, fame, a hero's welcome in Spain and everything you could want. And these people just parade down the street with your entire annual salary and don't even notice!

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from what is happening. Door 1: The Muiscas do not give the same value to gold as we do. And because their economy is based entirely on trade, with no currency as an intermediary, they use gold only for jewelry and art. They use it for display because it shines and doesn't corrode, and that's the only thing that matters if you don't assign it an artificial social value. Door 2: THESE SAVAGES MUST HAVE SO MUCH HIDDEN GOLD THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO PARADE LIKE IT'S NOTHING, AND THAT MEANS THE REALLY BIG LOAD MUST BE HIDDEN ELSEWHERE!

We must remember that the conquistadors were not simply a random group of fun-loving Spaniards from all walks of life. The people who chose to become conquistadors were people who wanted to conquer this new world, enslave others, and steal gold and silver from it so they could return to Spain unimaginably rich. You could say that this is a selection pressure that will likely produce a population of conquistadors who are generally much more likely to break down door number 2 than to consider the anthropological possibilities of door number 1. They had found "The Golden Man", the golden man, they had found a lake full of sacrificed gold, and guess what, that wasn't enough.

It was time to shorten the name and look for El Dorado, the city of gold... or literally just "the gold", which is honestly more obvious. Before I continue with that mess, I just want to draw attention to what happened to Lake Guatavita, because it's pretty funny. The Zipas coronation ceremonies left the lake filled with shiny gold artifacts, and the conquistadors wanted it, but dredging technology was not up to par in 1540, so the process was not easy. In 1545, two conquistadors attempted to lower the water level manually with a chain of buckets, which took three months and only lowered the water level by 2 meters.

But they got $100,000 in gold, so I guess it's nothing to sneeze at. More than I get from my swimming trips anyway. In 1580, a businessman named Antonio de Sepúlveda formed a team to dig a huge notch in the lake, lowering the water level by 20 feet and raising $300,000 in gold before the notch collapsed and all the workers in it died. Somehow he managed to die ruined. Things stagnated a bit until 1898, when a British-controlled company, creatively called "The Guatavita Lagoon Exploitation Company," installed a huge pump that drained the entire lake in three feet of silt and mud, which It hardened until it became concrete. under the sun, making almost all gold completely untraceable.

They took out a small amount of gold, less than $80,000 by today's standards, and went bankrupt soon after. God, it's almost as if this place is somehow sacred, and to mess with it is asking for trouble. Anyway, it has been a protected place since 1965, so don't even think about it. So, with a paltry amount of gold in Lake Guatavita and no gold-paved streets in sight, the conquistadors began searching for the true vein of gold, El Dorado. And in the process, things got pretty crazy. In 1539, for example, conquistadors heard of something called the Seven Cities of Gold, seven wealthy towns located in what is now the Arizona desert.

After these rumors, the conquistadors found a handful of pretty towns, but no gold, silver, or turquoise, so they conquered them, enslaved all their inhabitants, and set up local government, just like you do. In 1541, conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, younger half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, who overthrew the Inca Empire, heard a story from locals about a valley in the east full of gold and cinnamon. Gonzalo organizes a huge expedition of 340 conquistadors and 4,000 locals, but they do not find any valley and many of them die. When the expedition is forced to turn back, Gonzalo sends his friend Francisco de Orellana to continue searching this valley, and although he does not find El Dorado, he does find the Amazon River, which he calls Amazonas after being beaten by a group of women. warriors Very appropriate.

In 1560, a group of about 300 conquistadors is led by Pedro de Ursua in a supposed search for El Dorado, but this is actually a cover for his true motive, which is to get rid of them. They are all veterans of the Inca Conquest and have nothing to do but cause trouble, so just try to prevent them from destroying anything important by getting them as far away as possible. Unfortunately, he is murdered by his right-hand man, the conquistador Lope de Aguirre, and the gang then marches towards the coast, destroying native villages wherever they go. I assure you, I am surprised that the conquistadors were so sneaky and reckless with the indigenous peoples.

So far they seemed very nice. Things take a turn in 1595, when an Englishman gets involved in the action. A certain Sir Walter Raleigh, who is determined to find El Dorado, because- Uh, wait a minute, I think I wrote this- Uh, okay, because he heard the story of a man named Juan Martínez, who doesn't exist, but probably exists. was based on a real man named Juan Martín de Abujar, and Juan Martínez was said to have been part of an expedition to find El Dorado led by the conquistador Diego de Ordaz, but Diego de Ordaz's expedition took place around 1529, and also he died in 1532, and this is said to have happened to Juan Martínez in 1570, so the writer probably confused Diego de Ordaz with another conquistador, Pedro Maraver de Silva, who did search for El Dorado around 1568, and Juan Martín de Abujar on his crew had done it, but who cares.

So this Juan Martínez, who participated in the search for El Dorado with Diego de Ordaz, 40 years after the death of Diego de Ordaz, THIS man was captured by natives and taken to El Dorado and he saw the streets all paved with gold and those things, and HE says that El Dorado is completely real. That's the story he made Sir Walter Raleigh say: "I've never heard anything so legitimate in all my life, come on!" It's all a bit Don Quixote, but whatever, let's get on with it. So not only is Sir Walter Raleigh chasing El Dorado, but he means it and is a complete disaster.

He kidnaps a conquistador, Antonio de Berrio, to show him around before getting rid of him. But it doesn't end there, oh no. Sir Raleigh has many ideas about El Dorado. For example, he has decided that it is actually a city called Manoah, and that it is located on the shores of a Parime lake. Since that real golden empire with a sacred golden 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 base for a colony to drive the Spanish out of South America and keep all that sweet, sweet New World money for himself.

Quite a complicated plan. Only one small problem: El Dorado was not cooperating. Raleigh couldn't find it. And although later explorers and cartographers randomly placed Manoa and Lake Parime on their maps of South America, thinking they were probably there somewhere, there was never evidence that either place existed. I can say that without all that searching for El Dorado, our maps of South America would probably be much less extensive. Nothing moves cartographers more than the promise of a lost secret city. Anyway, in 1616, Sir Walter Raleigh, now old and worn out, returns to the New World to resume the hunt for El Dorado and immediately sacks a Spanish outpost, killing his son and his lieutenant, and in the process also violates a treaty of 1604 with Spain. prompting King James to execute him to avoid an international incident. "Mmm, good job, sir.

Bully to you." People continue to regularly go on dangerous expeditions in search of El Dorado or Lake Parime, and continue to find nothing, and in some notable cases, a local resident comes to tell the ruling conquistadors that they have found silver or gold in the rocks of a far away and dangerous place, and the expedition always sets off at full speed, and they never find anything, and usually they die, and surprisingly they still fall into the trap. I have a feeling that the third time I was locked in my own basement, I wouldn't fall for the Amontillado Gambit again.

Adding to some spectacularly entertaining stupidity, conquistadors regularly found large quantities of platinum during their search for gold, but discarded it as trash and called it "immature silver," which literally means platinum. Local people have been working with it for centuries because it shares many properties with gold, such as being almost completely resistant to corrosion and relatively easy to work with. And they had many finely crafted platinum ornaments that were literally unique to the region. Ironically, the conquistadors did not see its value because platinum is very rare and because at the time they did not even know it existed.

They literally took nuggets of the world's rarest precious metal and threw them away as scrap metal because it wasn't yellow. And if you think that's bad, Spain later had a little problem with platinum people. They used to counterfeit gold coins because they were similar in weight and softness, and Spain responded to this financial crisis by Leasing ALL ITS NATIONAL STOCKS OF PLATINUM INTO THE OCEAN. This whole debacle is such an incredibly apt metaphor for the inherent flaws of the colonial system and how the lust for gold literally blinded them to the true unique value of the New World, that if I had read it in a book, I, the writer, would have I have called amoron. “Oh, the colonizers are discarding the colony's incredibly valuable and unique resource as worthless scrap because they are too busy searching for their own personal currency that they have arbitrarily assigned value to.

Yeah, well, and I bet the real honey was the. friends you made along the way, right? I swear, nothing owned colonial Spain more than Spain itself. In any case, the passion for the search for El Dorado began to wane several centuries after its appearance. In 1743, French explorer and mathematician Charles Marie de la Condamine mapped the Amazon and many of its tributaries, later writing that he had found no trace of El Dorado and that the story was probably the result of greedy conquistadors eager to listen. that there was a magical city full of gold that had not yet been looted, and locals desperate and eager to get rid of those damned Spaniards, sending them on a wild goose chase just to get rid of them.

A very bad or very good combination, depending on how you look at it. In the 19th century, El Dorado was considered basically fiction, that if it really existed, someone would have already found it, and that the only reason anyone ever thought it was real was simply an illusion with no basis in reality. It would be great if El Dorado was real. Personally, I think there is a serious shortage of interesting things to discover in this era of accurate satellite images and accurate world maps and so on. But El Dorado is more of a warning than anything else.

In theory, it's rewarding enough to make you wish it were real. It's plausible enough to make you seriously consider the possibility that it could be real. And most importantly, the bar is set so high that anything incredibly interesting you find while searching will never feel like what you're looking for. The conquistadors found an enormously wealthy empire that dumped gold into its own lake every few decades, and it didn't look enough like El Dorado for them. It would never be enough. As the search continued, and it became increasingly clear that the only El Dorado they expected to find would be completely overgrown ruins or just a random lake, the appeal faded.

If there is not enough gold, it is not El Dorado and you had to keep looking. And that's the good thing about greed. There would never be enough gold. El Dorado is that rare myth that consists of nothing but illusions. There are no deeper origins, not a shred of truth, just a bunch of greedy people being eaten alive, looking for something to finally satisfy that hunger. Maybe they should have tried friendship. I have heard that it is the greatest treasure of all.