El Dorado El Dorado (Spanish for ‘the gilded one’) is a legend that began with the story of a South American tribal chief who covered himself with gold dust and would dive into a lake of pure mountain water. The legend began in the 1530s, in the Andes of present-day Colombia, where conquistador Gonzalo JimĂ©nez de Quesada first found the Muisca, a nation in the modern day Cundinamarca and Boyacá highlands of Colombia, in 1537. The story of the Muisca rituals was brought to Quito by Sebastian de Belalcazar’s men; mixed with other rumors, there arose the legend of ‘El Dorado’. Imagined as a place, El Dorado became a kingdom, an empire, the city of this legendary golden king
Home / Questions / Deluded by a legend, Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro departed from Ecuador in 1541 in a disastrous expedition towards the Amazon Basin; they did not find any gold or lost cities but Orellana became the first person to navigate the entire Amazon River. What were they seeking?