Original subtitles

Tonight, a famed ancient city overflowing with gold.

MARTIN PEPPER: The legend of El Dorado takes hold

amongst the Spanish, and people start

looking for it everywhere.

For centuries, explorers seeking it

find only disappointment or death.

AMORY SIVERTSON: It’s less a quest for gold

and more a fight for survival.

Now we reveal the top theories

surrounding this legendary lost city.

MARTIN: Pictures from space show what appears

to be rivers of gold weaving through the area.

There could be a lost golden city

right there under the rainforest canopy.

There’s not just one golden city.

There’s multiple golden cities.

Does El Dorado exist? And if so, where could it be?

♪ ♪

LAURENCE: March, 1537.

For nearly 20 years, the Spanish have been on a mission

to conquer South America with their infamous

army of conquistadors.

As part of that mission,

Chief Magistrate Gonzalo Jimenez De Quesada

leads an expedition to find

an overland route from present-day Colombia to Peru.

De Quesada and his men have been tasked with finding a way

around or over or through the Andes mountains,

a long mountain range that has proven

to be an obstacle to the Spanish conquistadors.

It’s a brutal trek.

There’s bad weather, it’s cold, there’s disease.

The men are really ready to give up.

But then De Quesada hears a rumor

that causes him to completely change his mission.

LAURENCE: The rumor, a city filled with gold.

This is absolute music to De Quesada’s ears,

because for Spanish conquistadors,

nothing is more important than gold.

For decades, the Spanish have been exploring

Central and South America and conquering its peoples.

Along the way, they’ve sent back ships

filled with tons of gold

and stories of unbelievable wealth

to be found in the Americas.

Stories of what is waiting to still be found,

unlimited resources, unlimited land,

unlimited food and wealth were believed to be possible.

The problem is, by the time De Quesada

gets to South America, most of the easy to find

stores of gold have already been plundered.

Now he’s desperate to know, "Where is this

so-called golden village?"

LAURENCE: As De Quesada’s troops press further south,

they encounter the indigenous Muisca people.

The Muisca are as advanced as Aztec,

Inca, or even the Maya, but they aren’t as warlike

or even really as organized.

MARTIN: They’re more like a loose confederation of tribes,

but they’re known as skilled metal workers,

and their metal of choice is gold.

Gold has no monetary value for them.

They use it because it’s soft and easy to work with.

But it also has a spiritual significance for them

because the Muisca’s god, Chiminigagua, is a sun god

and gold shines like the sun.

This suggested to Quesada that there was more

where it came from, and he was gonna go find it.

LAURENCE: De Quesada’s men quickly overpower the Muisca

and interrogate them about where to find gold.

The Muisca people describe a ritual to De Quesada

in which a new leader is coronated,

and the ritual entails this new leader.

He will be called the Zipa.

He is covered in a sticky substance

that then is covered with gold dust.

Then they take him out to the middle of a sacred lake

on a raft, and they put gold statues, figurines

and jewels on the raft.

And there are thousands of Muisca people

standing on the banks, watching all of this.

BUDDY LEVY: At which point, the chieftain immerses himself

in the lake, cleansing himself of the gold dust,

and the attendants throw trinkets and gold objects

into the middle of the lake.

Thousands of people are along the banks,

also throwing gold themselves.

And when that man emerges, he’s the new chief,

the Zipa of the community, and he is known, importantly,

as El Dorado, The Golden Man.

♪ ♪

Although it’s just the story of a man, De Quesada

considers this to be something much bigger.

He thinks of this man as a golden king

who must live in a golden kingdom,

and therefore all he has to do is find it.

LAURENCE: Inspired by the story of the Muisca,

De Quesada believes he’ll find the golden city

on the shores of a nearby lake.

♪ ♪

The Spanish press on, and soon De Quesada comes

upon a body of water called Lake Guatavita.

Lake Guatavita is located about 35 miles northeast of Bogota.

It’s a really beautiful, almost supernatural or eerie place.

The lake is almost perfectly round.

It’s surrounded by trees, it reflects the sky,

it reflects the environment around it.

There’s no obvious city on its shores,

but De Quesada still thinks this is the place.

He thinks this city must have either been abandoned

or perhaps it lies underwater.

ALEXEI VRANICH: The Spanish think that all they need to do

is get to the bottom of the lake and they can recover

all these golden jewels that have been thrown in.

DR. LYNNE S. MCNEILL: De Quesada is here

in the mid-1500s, so the technology to get underwater

simply isn’t available.

To get to the treasure, they assume

they’re gonna have to drain the entire lake.

It’s an insane amount of manual labor.

But they have a captive workforce.

Two conquistadors, Lazaro Fonte and De Quesada’s

own brother, Hernan Perez de Quesada,

come up with a plan.

They are going to empty out this entire lake by hand.

They essentially form this huge bucket chain.

Using the brute force of these captured indigenous people,

they’d spend months taking the water

out of Lake Guatavita, one bucket at a time.

LAURENCE: Progress is painfully slow.

After three months, they haven’t come close to their goal.

They manage to drop the water level about ten feet,

and they do find some pieces of gold

in the mud that they manage to expose.

It’s not nothing, but it’s certainly

no lavish city of gold.

Their bounty ends up being worth about $100,000

in today’s money, certainly not a fortune.

LAURENCE: Without the technology to explore any further,

hundreds of years pass with no new discoveries.

Then, in the late 1800s,

a British entrepreneur is inspired to investigate.

In 1898, Hartley Knowles hears about De Quesada’s efforts.

He has started the company for the exploration

of the lagoon at Guatavita, and he now is taking

his turn at getting to that gold.

What’s different now is that it’s the turn of the century,

and Britain is an industrial powerhouse,

so he has much better equipment at his disposal.

They bring in a massive steam pump

and earth-moving equipment

to dig a huge tunnel under the middle of Guatavita,

and start to drain it.

LAURENCE: After six years, the lake is finally emptied.

But what remains is another problem.

Hartley Knowles manages to get to the bottom of the lake.

BUDDY LEVY: The problem is, when he gets to the bottom of it,

there’s silt and mud and hard pan,

and as it’s baked in the sun, it becomes like cement.

And so they have to abandon the project.

After spending all that time and money,

Knowles and his company only end up finding

about 30 to 40 golden artifacts in the mud.

They’re auctioned off at Sotheby’s in London in 1909,

and they’re sold for a whopping total of 500 British pounds.

Unsurprisingly, the company goes bankrupt.

By 1965, Lake Guatavita has been almost ruined,

and the Colombian government has decided that it’s had enough.

LAURENCE: The government bans any further exploration

of Lake Guatavita,

officially ending the quest for El Dorado here.

But Lake Guatavita was not the only candidate

for the location of El Dorado, not by a long shot.

LAURENCE: When Spanish conquistador

Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada

spreads a rumor of a lost city of gold in 1537,

others quickly expand the search far and wide.

The legend of El Dorado starts to take hold

amongst the Spanish, and so they look everywhere,

all over South America.

Many of these soldiers have come looking for gold,

and they haven’t seen much of it yet.

Among the inspired conquistadors is Gonzalo Pizarro.

He’s the half-brother of Francisco Pizarro,

the man who conquered the Inca Empire,

and brought boatloads of gold back to Spain.

Because of the strength of his last name,

Pizarro has been made the vice governor in Quito,

which is modern-day Ecuador.

But he has bigger ambitions than just being

the local vice governor.

LAURENCE: In 1541, four years after De Quesada’s expedition,

Pizarro sets out on his own quest to find El Dorado.

Pizarro enlists the help of his childhood friend

and cousin, Francisco de Orellana.

Pizarro speaks to a different indigenous group in Ecuador,

and he’s told that the gold that De Quesada seeks

is actually much further south than where he’s looking.

It’s some 600 miles south,

and it’s not even in the Andes mountain region.

MARTIN: Avoiding the mountains sounds like a really good idea

to Pizarro, but he doesn’t realize

this new destination is just as treacherous.

According to his sources, El Dorado sits on the shores

of a river deep in the Amazon rainforest.

♪ ♪

LAURENCE: In February, 1541, the two men leave Quito

with 340 Spaniards and some 4,000 indigenous people.

They head due east across the Andes,

then down into the lowlands, then toward the far southeast

of Ecuador, where the Amazon rainforest begins.

They end up being some of the first Europeans

to explore the Amazon jungle,

but they are not remotely ready for it.

It’s hot, it’s humid, and the growth is so dense

that they have to use their swords

to hack their way through it.

They have natives with them that they’ve brought,

but the natives are from the mountain region,

so they are also unprepared for this sort of climate.

And as time goes on and they struggle more and more,

they begin to be hungry.

People begin to get sick, some of them begin to die.

LAURENCE: But Pizarro remains undeterred.

It’s almost like the harder the trek becomes,

the more convinced Pizarro is that El Dorado

is just around the corner.

He becomes consumed with finding this city.

Nothing else seems to matter.

He drives these suffering men further southeast,

looking for this river that’ll ultimately lead him to gold.

Every time the Spanish encounter any indigenous in the jungle,

Pizarro questions them where this city of gold is,

and they always tell him,

"Keep going, you’ll encounter it eventually."

LAURENCE: After eleven months, the crew has traveled

nearly 200 miles with nothing to show for it.

By the time Pizarro’s company gets to the banks

of the Coca River, most of his men

are either dead, dying or very sick.

They’ve lost 3,000 natives and 140 conquistadors.

They’ve run out of food, eating their horses to stay alive.

It’s less a quest for gold and more a fight for survival.

The expedition is on the verge of mutiny,

and so they make a plan to build a boat

to travel down the river.

On December 26th, 1541, Pizarro tells his partner, Orellana,

to take 50 men in the boat down the river

to find food and bring it back to the rest of the team.

The current of the river is strong,

so Orellana makes very good time.

Unfortunately, it’s 14 days before they find any food,

and because of the current, they realize

there’s no way to turn around and go back,

so they decide to just keep going forward.

Orellana has all the men sign a document

saying that they understand

what they’re doing, but they had no other choice.

Orellana knows this may end up being useful later

because they may be considered traitors

and sentenced to be executed.

LAURENCE: After one month, Pizarro realizes

his old friend is not coming back.

Pizarro thinks maybe they were attacked by a hostile tribe.

But he also starts to wonder

if maybe his cousin had betrayed him.

He thinks, "If I had found El Dorado, would I come back?"

Gonzalo Pizarro takes the remnant men who were

stranded on the side of the river and arrives back

in Quito literally shoeless and in rags,

and he vows that if he ever sees Orellana again,

he’s going to kill him.

LAURENCE: Meanwhile, Orellana continues his journey.

The swift current has carried Orellana’s team even farther,

and they still haven’t seen any trace of a city of gold.

Eventually, they meet up with the much larger Amazon River.

He figures this is the sacred body of water

that will eventually lead to El Dorado.

At first, it seems he might be right.

As they get further into the Amazon basin,

they start to see these great settlements,

thriving cities with people all adorned in gold.

These locals feed the Spanish,

and even teach them some of their language.

As the Spanish keep going,

they hear stories of even bigger, more opulent cities

deeper in the jungle.

But the farther they travel,

the less friendly those encounters get.

They start running into native groups

that are defensive and then native groups

that are attacking them and keeping them

from being able to land anywhere on shore.

One of these attacks actually leads

to the naming of the Amazon River.

It doesn’t have a name until June 24th, 1542,

when Orellana and his men are attacked by a local tribe

where the women fight right alongside the men.

He refers to these women as Amazonas,

based on the mythical Greek women warriors

described by Herodotus.

Orellana starts calling the area

The River of the Amazons, and the name sticks.

♪ ♪

LAURENCE: Finally, after eight months

and over 3,000 miles,

Orellana and his crew reach the Atlantic Ocean.

Even though he doesn’t know it yet, Orellana has just

successfully traveled the entire length of the world’s

longest river, and he’s the first European to do so.

But, unfortunately, he does it without reaching El Dorado.

LAURENCE: Word of Orellana’s voyage

reaches Quito and eventually Spain.

Pizarro hears the news, and he accuses his cousin

of treason, hoping to get him hanged.

But, in the end, because of the document

that the entire crew signed and that detailed log

that they kept, Orellana is found not guilty

and he returns safely to Spain, where he’s welcomed

by King Charles I as sort of a celebrity.

Once Orellana is back in Spain, he has pretty much one goal,

and that is to get back to South America.

He is convinced that he came so close

to finding the real El Dorado,

he basically makes the pitch to everyone that he can do this,

that he will find the city of gold, that if he gets

the supplies and the funding and the crew that he needs,

he will be able to go straight to El Dorado itself.

LAURENCE: His pitch works.

In May of 1545, Francisco de Orellana

heads back into the Amazon.

It’s his second expedition to find El Dorado,

but this time, he knows exactly where he needs to go

and he’s completely confident that he’s gonna get there.

LAURENCE: Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana’s

first attempt to find El Dorado has failed.

But, in 1545, he’s ready to try again.

His previous expedition operated under the assumption

that El Dorado is in the far western region

of the Amazon rainforest, in what’s now Ecuador.

After a disastrous attempt, they couldn’t find it there.

But as Orellana traveled east along the Amazon River

in what’s now Brazil, he saw larger cities

with indigenous there adorned in gold.

And it’s in that area in which he believes

he will find El Dorado.

♪ ♪

Last time, after attacks by native peoples,

Orellana wasn’t really able to get very far from shore

and really explore these cities or what lies beyond.

So that’s what he’s going to do this time.

LAURENCE: On May 11th, 1545 Orellana departs from Spain.

The disaster of his previous expedition

is fresh in his mind, so he is attempting to be

more than prepared this time around.

He brings four ships, more than 300 men and supplies

to build an additional two ships when they get to the mouth

of the Amazon to help them navigate up the river.

He has everything he needs.

He knows the way. This time, he can’t fail.

They sail first to the Spanish-controlled

Canary Islands, where they spend the first couple of months

loading supplies, getting the ships ready

for the open seas, and recruiting more men.

LAURENCE: The next planned stop is the Cape Verde Islands,

off the west coast of Africa, which the Spanish also control.

It’s here where Orellana’s expedition

starts to really unravel.

There’s an epidemic that kills 98 of his men

and then another 60 of them desert.

He’s downed so many sailors that he decides

to abandon one of his ships entirely

and cross the Atlantic with just the remaining three ships.

The Atlantic crossing is a disaster from the outset.

One of his ships is blown off course

and he never sees it again.

This costs Orellana an additional 77 men,

more supplies and all of the material

that they were gonna use to build those additional

two ships to navigate up the Amazon.

LAURENCE: In spite of that, on December 20th, 1545,

Orellana arrives on the east coast of Brazil.

When he arrives, he has only two ships

and fewer than 100 men.

This is not a promising start to what he knows

is going to be a difficult expedition.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of food where they land,

and the natives are friendly.

So Orellana’s men suggest that they just

make camp and regroup for a little while.

But Orellana is so eager to find El Dorado that he says,

"No. On we go."

Orellana may have been here before,

but this time he gets lost.

The mouth of the Amazon is a wild tangle of tributaries.

The group travels over 300 miles,

trying to find the entrance of the Amazon River.

The journey is over before it’s begun.

They never even got anywhere near El Dorado.

In fact, they never even got

into the main Amazon River itself.

And if El Dorado is hiding deep in Brazil, they’ll never know.

In the end, less than 40 of the original 300 men survive

by making it back to the island of Margarita,

just west of Trinidad.

After the collapse of Orellana’s expedition,

he’s basically branded a liar.

People begin to suspect that he made the whole thing up

or maybe that he was just covering up

for having abandoned Pizarro or that he just wanted

to secure funding for his next expedition.

But the rumors of El Dorado sitting somewhere along

the Amazon persist, and over the next hundred years,

a handful of other expeditions to Brazil are launched,

all of which turn up nothing.

♪ ♪

LAURENCE: Eventually, the search for El Dorado

in the Amazon appears to die out.

Then, in December, 2020,

astronauts on board the International Space Station

spot something peculiar near Bolivia.

Pictures from space show what appears to be

rivers of gold weaving through the area.

They turn out to be illegal gold mining operations

and they are huge, which is obvious,

if you can see them from space.

LAURENCE: This evidence reignites a modern-day hunt

for El Dorado, this time in a whole new area.

♪ ♪

In 2022, a team of researchers led

by Heiko Prumers

from the German Archaeological Institute

head to the Bolivian rainforest

to do 3D scanning of the landscape from the air.

MARTIN: And what these researchers discover

is absolutely amazing.

It appears to be an ancient civilization

that’s been lost for centuries.

There are pyramids, 60 feet high,

rectangular structures, paths and roads.

It’s like a city hidden inside the rainforest.

LAURENCE: The team estimates

this settlement was abandoned nearly 500 years ago,

around the same time the conquistadors arrived.

Prumers estimates that it might have taken

researchers centuries to find these cities in the jungle,

but the LIDAR technology allowed them

to find it in a matter of days.

So the media seizes on this story.

I mean, who doesn’t love a treasure hunt?

And the myth of El Dorado has been going on

for hundreds of years, and now we have these images

that suggest there could be a lost golden city

right there under the rainforest canopy.

MARTIN: Further aerial investigations

have turned up geoglyphs and massive roads

the size of highways.

All of this leads us to believe that Orellana

was telling the truth about the cities that he saw.

LAURENCE: Unfortunately, a full expedition proves too difficult.

The Amazon basin itself is enormous.

It’s more than 2.7 million square miles,

and about two million of those square miles

have never really been explored or studied.

It’s an area the size of India.

There’s a lot we still don’t know

about the interior of the Amazon.

It’s just so overgrown and impenetrable.

The access is difficult.

The terrain is difficult.

The weather conditions are difficult.

There’s no way to get in equipment.

For now, aerial studies are our best bet

for finding any answers.

So it seems that Orellana wasn’t lying,

that he was telling the truth, at least about the cities.

We can’t be totally sure about the gold.

♪ ♪

The lure of El Dorado,

the lost city of gold, has captured the imagination

of generations of treasure-seekers.

But perhaps none are more renowned or more determined

than a world famous British explorer

who takes on the search in the late 1500s.

In 1585, England and Spain are engaged

in a long running conflict.

So you’ve probably heard of the Spanish Armada.

That’s just a part of a 19-year long war

called the Anglo-Spanish War.

While that war was fought officially between

these two countries, there was also

a very large amount of guerrilla warfare.

The English were sponsoring piracy,

what they called privateers, sending ships out

to basically attack the Spanish ships

that were attempting the conquest of the New World.

One of the top English privateers

is Sir Walter Raleigh, who’s already famous

as an explorer and a statesman.

And he’s a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.

While he’s off raiding Spanish ships,

he hears a lot about what they’ve been up to

in South America.

LAURENCE: Including their search for El Dorado.

At some point in the 1590s, Raleigh hears the story

of Juan Martinez, a conquistador who had explored

the Orinoco river area 20 years earlier in the 1570s.

According to Martinez, when his expedition fails,

he’s blindfolded by the natives and taken to a city of gold.

Raleigh speaks to other Spanish conquistadors, and they tell him

that the golden city he’s looking for is called Manoa.

And they tell him that it is the imperial city

of this region, which at the time is called Guyana.

♪ ♪

It’s located near a lake called Parime.

It’s supposedly a saltwater lake that’s massive.

It’s 600 miles across.

Raleigh is told that the natives get all their gold

from the lake itself, that it flows down the river

and tumbles into the lake, where they can find it.

LAURENCE: In April, 1595, Raleigh arrives in South America

with four ships and 100 men.

So after landing near present-day Guyana,

Raleigh and his men take five small boats

up the Orinoco River.

It’s a long and arduous process

because they’re going against the current,

and his men are not used to all this heat and humidity.

After a month, they’ve gone a little over 200 miles,

and they’re exhausted.

So they decide to pull off the river,

take a break, and recover.

When they come ashore, Raleigh and his compatriots

make contact with a native tribe

who’s friendly to them and who’s also adorned in gold.

At this point, there are literally

just nuggets of gold lying on the banks of the river.

Raleigh ends up befriending the chief of this tribe.

His name is Topiawari, and he tells Raleigh

of a giant lake full of gold just nearby,

and Raleigh, of course, assumes this must be Parime.

This is the lake he’s looking for.

LAURENCE: Raleigh spends the next three months

desperately searching for El Dorado.

All of his men are exhausted.

They’re in no condition to keep going,

so he decides that he’s going to turn back,

and when everyone is refreshed again, they will start over,

and they’ll come back and find it.

LAURENCE: When he arrives back in England

at the end of August, 1595,

Raleigh expects a hero’s welcome.

He’s certain he’ll be celebrated and will have

no issues raising funds for a new expedition,

but that’s not what happens, because he doesn’t bring back

any gold, there’s no return on investments,

and so nobody wants to fund another expedition.

LAURENCE: Ultimately, Raleigh waits another 22 years.

Queen Elizabeth I dies on March, 24th, 1603,

and she was his main patron.

So after her death, Raleigh decides to support

a rival for the Crown instead of the rightful heir, James I.

LAURENCE: But James becomes King,

and Raleigh is immediately imprisoned

in the Tower of London, where he remains until 1616.

Even languishing in prison, Raleigh never gives up

on his dream of finding El Dorado.

And in 1617, he’s pardoned by King James

and finally given permission for a second expedition

to South America under one condition.

The King knows how much Raleigh hates the Spanish,

but there’s finally peace between the two countries.

So he makes Raleigh promise that he’s not gonna do

anything to disrupt this delicate truce

that the countries have.

Reluctantly, Raleigh agrees.

LAURENCE: Raleigh departs England for a second attempt

in 1617.

This time, he brings along his son Wat.

When they reach the mouth of the Orinoco River this time,

Raleigh, who’s now an old man, sends his son Wat

to lead a search party, while he stays

back on board the ship.

Within days, his men did exactly what they were told not to do.

They went into Spanish territory and started a fight.

Wat Raleigh is shot through the neck with a musket and dies.

When the rest of the party returns to the ship,

the second in command commits suicide.

Raleigh is distraught. Their mission is over.

He’s lost his son.

He’s disobeyed the King,

and he has no gold to show for it.

He decides to turn around and head back home,

knowing full well the fate that he’s about to face.

Upon his return to England, Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded

by order of King James I,

accused of deliberately inciting war

between England and Spain.

It’s another tragic end in the search for El Dorado.

It seems to be a curse for anybody trying to find it.

♪ ♪

LAURENCE: And there’s a further ironic twist.

Centuries later, in 1871, a gold mine is opened

in El Callao, Venezuela,

very close to the location where Raleigh stopped

with his men and met the natives adorned with gold.

It turns into one of the richest mines

in the world at the time, exporting more

than a million ounces of gold in a 20 year period.

The mine is still active today.

There is potentially $2 trillion worth of materials

in the ground right beneath

where Raleigh and his company had stopped.

He just missed it.

LAURENCE: Conquistador Gonzalo De Quesada

spreads the story of El Dorado in 1537,

but his is not the first Spanish take

on this legendary city.

In fact, ten years earlier, a group of Spanish explorers

have an incredible experience of their own.

It’s a story so unbelievable,

it becomes famous throughout Spain.

LAURENCE: In 1527, conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez

departs for the New World with 600 men.

His mission, to explore and colonize

what is now the Gulf Coast of America.

Narvaez visits and maps what are now Hispaniola,

Cuba and Florida,

but like many expeditions at the time,

it had its struggles.

Narvaez himself dies within the first year,

and ships and supplies are lost to hurricanes.

By 1532, only four of the original 600 men remain.

Eventually, they cross the Gulf of Mexico

and land in what is now Texas,

becoming the first Europeans to cross the Gulf.

They need to get back to a Spanish outpost,

the closest being in Mexico,

so they start walking through today’s American Southwest.

After a few years, in 1536, they’re able

to get back to Mexico City, where they tell their tale

of survival, which is incredible in its own right.

But even more incredible is something they heard about

along the way, seven different cities of gold.

And just as the Narvaez crew comes back

with their stories of cities of gold,

Quesada is hearing stories of a golden city in Colombia.

At this point, many of the Spanish begin to believe

it’s all connected.

There’s not just one golden city.

There’s a gold-rich civilization spread through the Americas

with multiple golden cities,

and El Dorado is just one of them.

♪ ♪

LAURENCE: In 1539, Mexican Governor

Vasquez de Coronado decides to investigate.

Coronado sends up Franciscan Friar Marcos De Niza, and one

of the original survivors from the first expedition

to bring back evidence of the seven cities of gold.

LAURENCE: When the friar returns five months later, he shares

stories of a fantastical pueblo he calls Cibola.

It is just full of wealth, as though it is made of gold.

The area that the friar describes

is in present-day New Mexico,

and the region of the Zuni people.

Coronado mounts an even larger expedition,

convinced that the Cibola described

by Marcos de Niza is in fact El Dorado,

one of the famous golden cities.

LAURENCE: On April 22nd, 1540,

Coronado’s team departs from Culiacan.

Coronado dispatches 400 conquistadors

and 2,000 indigenous peoples.

What they find is small outposts dwellings

that looked like pueblos.

There are seven cities in the area,

but they’re all very similar to the first.

They’re very small, no evidence of gold.

It seems, in fact, that Coronado

had been duped by the friar.

LAURENCE: But Coronado is convinced

the stories of El Dorado are still true.

The peoples of these pueblos tell Coronado

that there are cities of gold, but they’re farther

to the north, and they should keep marching.

And Coronado and his men, believing that they haven’t

reached it yet, keep marching for months and months

and hundreds and hundreds of miles.

By 1541, they’ve journeyed as far north as modern Kansas.

They don’t discover El Dorado, but they are the first Europeans

to see the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

Coronado eventually returns to Mexico City in 1542.

It was a long, disastrous journey

that did not result in finding a fantastic city of gold.

Coronado ends up bankrupt and dies a few years later,

yet one more life ruined by the search for unending wealth.

What’s ironic about all of this is that years later,

those same small pueblos would turn out to be rich

in ores like silver, copper, and turquoise.

If the Spanish hadn’t been so focused on finding

the golden city of El Dorado, they might have discovered

the riches that were there all along.

LAURENCE: Explorers have searched for the famed city

of El Dorado for five centuries

across both north and South America.

No one has found it.

There’s certainly been no shortage of people looking

for El Dorado, especially among the Spanish conquistadors.

And some theories suggest that there might be

a pretty good reason for that,

which is that El Dorado as a city was simply made up.

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Based on the artifacts that we’ve found,

we know that some indigenous communities

in Central and South America

used gold for decoration and religious purposes.

But that’s it. That’s all we know.

We have no proof of an actual golden city,

apart from the fact that the Spanish were

told stories about it

and were obsessed with finding it.

So one school of thought is that the natives were telling

the Spanish the truth, that there was a city of gold,

but what if they lied?

The indigenous people of the New World aren’t stupid.

They were understandably confused

by the Spanish desire for gold.

They did not value it

in the same way that the Spanish did.

They used it for decoration, for religious purposes,

but not for monetary value.

But they could clearly see the obsession

that the conquistadors had with getting more gold.

The Spanish come in with threats and attacks.

They’ll do anything to get this gold, even kill for it.

LAURENCE: Many South American historians believe

this inspires the natives to lie.

When the Spanish come looking for gold,

the indigenous people just want to survive.

They want to get the Spanish out of there as fast as possible.

So they tell them, "Yes, there is the gold you’re looking for.

"It’s just over those mountains, just down that river,

just on the other side of this forest."

And the Spanish take the bait every time

and move on looking for that gold.

So one of the best examples of this is what happens

to Coronado when he’s marching through

the Southwestern desert looking for El Dorado.

Every pueblo he stops at tells him that this city

is a little more north, until he ends up

all the way up in Kansas.

LAURENCE: It’s not just the natives who benefit.

The Europeans use it to their own advantage.

They embellish claims of El Dorado

and its riches in order to attract crew

and financial backing for their expeditions.

When Francisco de Orellana goes back to Spain,

he has no gold to show for his efforts,

but what he does have is stories.

And when he tells the King what he heard

about the golden city of El Dorado, it works.

He gets his next expedition funded.

There’s one more convenient use for the El Dorado lie.

As the colonial conquest of South America ends,

the Spanish have an issue.

They have hundreds, maybe thousands of conquistadors

with nothing to do.

There’s no one left to conquer. There’s no more gold to steal.

They’re sitting around getting drunk, causing problems.

LAURENCE: Until they’re given a new purpose.

The actual Spanish government comes up with a plan

to send these idle soldiers off

on hunts to look for El Dorado, which, by this point,

they assume will be wild goose chases.

Not only does it keep them occupied,

but it gets them out of the cities

and into the jungles for weeks, months, maybe even years,

with a chance that they won’t come back.

At this point, the search for El Dorado

isn’t about finding gold.

It’s actually about getting rid of problems.

LAURENCE: One such documented expedition takes place in 1560.

That year, the Spanish send 300 conquistadors

on a search for El Dorado, led by Pedro de Ursua.

Ursua is asked to bring along a particularly troublesome group

of soldiers, led by Lope de Aguirre,

to essentially get rid of him for a while.

But Aguirre murders Ursua, and he and his soldiers

go on a marauding expedition,

leaving a trail of death and destruction.

Most of the 300 die along the way.

It’s an awful scene, but it also shows

that the Spanish government, by 1560,

they no longer even believe that El Dorado exists

or is worth looking for.

It’s just a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers.

Ursua says so himself in his letters.

He was just trying to occupy Aguirre and these idle veterans,

and he got himself killed in the process.

But thanks to the Spanish explorers

and modern-day excavations, we know that South America

had and still has tons of gold.

It’s just not all piled up in one city,

like the story said.

And, in that sense, the legend is real.

It’s not like these stories

are promising gold where none exists.

It does, and man’s imagination and greed filled in the rest.

Archaeologists continue to search

for lost ancient cities throughout South America,

and have found nearly a dozen in the past decade alone.

But none matches the allure

of the tantalizing lost city of gold.

Perhaps one day, El Dorado will be finally uncovered.

I’m Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History’s Greatest Mysteries."

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