In 1492 the Spaniards started the Conquista. It was under this name that the Spanish colonization of America entered history. Conquistadors moved to the New World and crushed empires. So in 1521, Hernan Cortez with a detachment of several hundred people crushed the huge empire of the Aztecs. All these conquests were accompanied by plunder, because the main goal of the conquistadors was gold. Murder, torture, genocide - the conquerors went to great lengths to take away from the Indians as much gold as possible.
How was the legend born?
In 1536, Jimenez de Quesada decided to conquer an Indian tribe, which was rumored to have an inexhaustible gold reserve. For almost a year, his squad wandered through the endless jungle, before the conquistadors came to the villages of the Chibcha Indians.
Chibcha warmly greeted the exhausted Spaniards, offered them gold as a gift. But Quesada was not satisfied with a simple gift. He wanted more and turned his weapon against the Chibcha, who saved him and his squad from death. In a few months, the Chibchas were completely conquered. In the hands of the conquerors was one old man who, under torture, told about the ritual of the Golden Man.
The ruler was coated with clay, sprinkled with golden sand, and he, together with several leaders, sailed on a balsa boat to the middle of the lake. From the boat, as well as from the shore, gold and precious stones were thrown into the water. The ruler jumped into the water, bringing his golden "vestments" as a gift to the gods. After that, the leaders returned to the shore together with the ruler. The ceremony is over.
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The conquistadors decided by all means to find the lake and get the jewels from its bottom. In the eyes of the Spaniards, the ceremony turned from a ceremony of enthroning a new ruler into an everyday sacrifice, and the country of the Indians into a place drowning in gold. This country began to be called Eldorado, which means "the land of gold".
Search for the golden land
Quesada once again gathered a detachment to search for Eldorado, but to no avail. Dying, he bequeathed to his successor Antonio de Berreo to find the golden country. Berreo questioned the local Indians and found out that the lake is located somewhere in the Orinoco river basin. He organized four expeditions, but none of them discovered the golden lake. The English pirate Walter Reilly tricked Berreo out of the secret of El Dorado and tried to equip an expedition there. But he did not succeed.
In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt became interested in Eldorado. He traveled to South America for five years and found out that there are no lakes in the Orinoco basin, but the floods of the river give the impression that there is really a huge lake here. He had already closed the question of El Dorado, when he suddenly found himself at Lake Guatavita. Here he believed that the stories about the Golden Man and El Dorado were true.
Millions at the bottom of the lake
Guatavita is a lake formed in the crater of an extinct volcano. Humboldt discovered on one of the banks dilapidated steps leading into the water. Here they are - evidence of the existence of the Golden Man rite. Humboldt calculated that if for a century a thousand people threw five gold objects into the lake each year, then at the bottom of the accumulated wealth of $ 300 million.
Quesada also tried to get at least one gold piece from the bottom of Guatavita. For this, he brought several thousand Indians and ordered them to scoop up water. The level of the lake dropped slightly, but the conquistador could not get anything. After him, many people repeatedly tried to drain the lake and get wealth from there, but they managed to get only a few trinkets.
In 1913, the British came to Lake Guatavita with water pumps. They almost drained the lake, got 10,000 dollars worth of gold from there, but didn't go further, because the silt from the bottom of the lake sucked everything in. The next day, the silt froze, and it became impossible to get the remaining gold. The treasure hunters had to take what they managed to pull out and return to England.
In 1965, the Colombian government declared Lake Guatavita a national reserve, making it impossible for treasure hunters to ever return to looking for treasures at the bottom of the lake. Is there any gold left there? We may never know this again.