Lake Guatavita

When the dream of El Dorado ended, not all its gold was forgotten

Long after the afterglow of what Schomburgk had called “that delusive bubble El Dorado” had ceased to enchant people, interest persisted in the stories of golden offerings made to Lake Guatavita – and the value of what therefore lay buried beneath its waters.

In fact, the first attempt to drain the lake was made as early as 1540 by Hernán Perez de Quesada, brother of Gonzalo Jiménez. The British naval engineer Charles Cochrane, who visited the site in the early 19th century to make his own attempts, reported one contemporary estimate that supposedly placed the value of the gold and precious stones cast into the lake as £1.12 billion, something like £107 billion in today’s money.

Efforts continued into the 20th century, with one team in 1910-11 finding some 62 artefacts, which were promptly put up for auction at Sotheby’s. However they found that, once drained, the mud on the lake floor almost immediately hardened like rock, making it almost impossible, with the available technology, to extract any more pieces before the lake began to fill up again. They reportedly found $10,000-worth of gold – having spent some $160,000 to find it.