What do you think about this?
High in the mountains above Bogotá, Colombia, sits a near perfect circular lake called Guatavita. To the Muisca people who lived there, it was not a place to swim or fish. It was a sanctuary. When a new ruler rose to power, he was stripped bare, covered head to toe in gold dust, and floated to the center of the lake on a raft piled with emeralds and golden offerings. There, before his people, he washed the gold from his body into the water and threw the treasures in after it, a gift to the gods below.
The Spanish heard these stories, and a single phrase set the New World on fire, El Dorado, the gilded man. Over the centuries it warped from a man into a lost city of gold, and men died by the thousands chasing it through the jungle.
But the lake was real, and so were the offerings. As early as the 1580s a Spanish merchant cut a notch into the rim and lowered the water enough to pull gold from the mud. In 1898 a British company drained it almost completely, only to watch the mud bake hard as concrete in the sun before they could dig.
Could it be that the real El Dorado was never a city at all, but the bottom of this one quiet lake, still holding what the Muisca gave away?
A drained and emptied legend, or a hoard still waiting under the silt? What do you think is at the bottom of Lake Guatavita?
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