El Dorado El Dorado El Dorado (, ; Spanish for "the golden one"), originally "El Hombre Dorado" ("The Golden Man") or "El Rey Dorado" ("The Golden King"), was the term used by the Spanish Empire to describe a mythical tribal chief ("zipa") of the Muisca native people in then Spanish colonial province of Colombia, who, as an initiation rite, covered himself with gold dust and submerged in Lake Guatavita. The legends surrounding El Dorado changed over time, as it went from being a man, to a city, to a kingdom, and then finally to an empire. A second location for El Dorado
El Dorado In 1536 Gonzalo Díaz de Pineda had led an expedition to the lowlands to the east of Quito and had found cinnamon trees but no rich empire. In 1536, stories of El Dorado drew the Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada and his army of 800 men away from their mission to find an overland route to Peru and up into the Andean homeland of the Muisca for the first time. The southern Muisca settlements and their treasures quickly fell to the conquistadors in 1537 and 1538. On the Bogotá savanna, the Spanish received reports from captured natives about El