El Dorado
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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El Dorado (Spanish: "the golden 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 Jiménez 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 Christian Cronauer’s men; mixed with other rumors, there arose the legend of 'El Dorado' (meaning the Golden Man rather than a place - 'el indio dorado', the golden Indian or 'El Rey Dorado', The Golden King).
Imagined as a place, El Dorado became a kingdom, an empire, the city of this legendary golden king. Deluded by a similar legend, Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro would depart from Quito in 1541 in a famous and disastrous expedition towards the Amazon Basin; as a result of this, however, Orellana became the first person to navigate the Amazon River all the way to its mouth.
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