Gold Museum

In front of you is the museum that holds the world's largest collection of pre-Hispanic goldwork, some 34,000 pieces of gold and tumbaga. But this stop is about something else: the most persistent myth of the conquest of the Americas.

1The golden man

The chroniclers tell that when the chief of Guatavita died, his heir was smeared with a sticky paste and covered in gold dust. Then, on a raft, he went out onto Lake Guatavita, north-east of Bogotá, and threw gold and emeralds into the water as an offering. Juan Rodríguez Freyle recorded the story in «El Carnero», written around 1636. According to the same sources, the ceremony was no longer practised when the Spaniards arrived.

From that ritual El Dorado was born: first a man, then a kingdom and, in the end, a city of gold that expeditions from Quito, Santa Marta and Coro searched for over generations without ever finding it.

2The drained lake

Greed did not wait. Hernán Pérez de Quesada, brother of Bogotá's founder, tried to drain the lake; later the merchant Antonio de Sepúlveda cut a great notch in its rim, and an English company emptied it almost completely in the early 20th century. The haul was always meagre.

The proof that the ceremony existed did not come from Guatavita: the Muisca raft on display here turned up in 1969 in a cave at Pasca, inside a clay pot.

There was another raft, found in 1856 in Lake Siecha. It was sold to a museum in Berlin and, so the story goes, it vanished when the ship carrying it caught fire in the port of Bremen.

3What to look for

• The almost windowless façade of the 1968 building, designed by the architect Germán Samper.
• Parque Santander, formerly the square of San Francisco.
• The Muisca raft, if you go in: it measures just 19.5 cm, with the chief at the centre.