Cultural Links

The Legend of El Dorado

A Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada reached the Plains of Bogota by following the Magdalena River and ascending the Andes, Europeans were scouring the llanos east of the mountains in a pertinacious search for El Dorado. From a twentieth century perspective, it is difficult to imagine a more unlikely location for the legendary lakeside kingdom ruled by the Guilded One, who annually dusted his body with gold.

Lying eighteen thousand feet below the peaks of the eastern cordillera and stretching for countless miles through modern Colombia and Venezuela, the llanos are a region of climatic extremes. Three months of drought follow nine months of heavy rains that last from March to November. Most of the land is infertile. Strips of rain forest rise along the fast flowing rivers, but the predominant vegetation is tropical bunch grass. Far from fostering the development of a great pre-Columbian empire, this environment could barely supply the needs of Indian hunters and gatherers. Nevertheless, observed physical reality provided no obstacle to sixteenth century minds that took for granted the authenticity of exotic kingdoms, and all too eagerly credited Indian reports of the presence of such places in the yet unknown portions of northern South America.

The earliest explorers included Germans as well as Spaniards, for in 1528 Charles I of Spain had granted the right to conquer and colonize Venezuela to the Augsburg banking house of Welser, who had helped him to become, as well, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The story of those dauntless adventurers who between 1531 and 1595 braved incredible hardships in fruitless exploration of the llanos is impressive testimony of the power of a legend that delivered few rewards and lured hundreds of brave souls to their deaths.

In the early sixteenth century the Spanish settlers of Hispaniola were bombarded with accounts of El Dorado-a land somewhere in South America inhabited by Indians who possessed hordes of gold. One version drew inspiration from a Chibcha religious ceremony. Every year those Andean Indians assembled at Lake Guatavita twenty miles from Bogota to venerate their goddess Bachue, mother of the human race, who had risen from the waters with a child in her arms, and to honor a princess condemned to sleep sacred iake, but the ritual's climax came when the Zipa, or King of Kings, naked and covered with gold dust, jumped from a raft into the water, washing off the precious substance as he swam. When Ambrose Ehinger, the German governor of Coro, Venezuela, arrived at the Magdalena River in 1531 in search of El Dorado, the Indians told him of a rich province called Xerira, which was probably a reference to the Jeridas plateau inhabited by Guane Indians at the northern limit of Chibcha territory. Ehinger died on a second expedition to Xerira, in 1533, but the legend grew when witnesses of his demise confirmed that he had been at the very gates of that mysterious land.

Excitement over Pizarro's conquest of Peru in the same year produced a second account of El Dorado. From the Inca came tales of a land of marvelous riches situated east of the Andes, between Peru and the River Plate. Credulous Spaniards identified this land variously as "Xerira," the "Amazon Kingdom," or "the country where cinnamon grows."

A third version of the legend, which placed El Dorado distinctly in the llanos, came from the Guahibo Indians. The Guahibo were a hunting and fishing people who lived on the plains.

The Guahibo told Spanish explorers that a rich kingdom called Meta could be found at the headwaters of the Meta and Guaviare rivers. By the 1530's Meta had become synonymous with El Dorado, and adventurers searched the Orinoco and Meta rivers in hopes of finding it. As late as 1688, Father Lucas Fernandez de Piedrahita in his Historia General de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada (General History of the Conquest of the New Kingdom of Granada) still referred to the Meta as a river of twenty-four carat gold.

Erroneous information about the size of South America bolstered belief in the existence of El Dorado. Until the midsixteenth century geographers maintained that the continent was a small land mass and very likely a group of islands. This theory supported the conjecture that there was an ocean strait through the "islands" that would permit direct travel from Europe to Asia. The early explorers thought that the Pacific lay south of the Caribbean rather than west of it, and that the Andes ran eastward following the "South Sea" coast line. The Welser governors carefully explored Lake Maracaibo in the hopes that it would lead to the strait, and when Nicholas Federmann in 1530 found a flooding tributary of the Orinoco only one hundred leagues from Coro he hailed it as the "South Sea."

The impression that both the South Sea and El Dorado lay just beyond the horizon caused a war of nerves among would-be conquistadors on the Venezuelan coast and later in the Colombian highlands. Captains who recklessly started out for the interior did not scruple at committing violence or rebellion to circumvent opponents; and the avalanches of people rushing to the imaginary gold country can only be compared to modern gold, oil, and rubber rushes.

First to reach the region was Diego de Ordaz, governor of the eastern part of Venezuela, known as Paria. A veteran of Cortez's campaign in Mexico, Ordaz followed the Orinoco in 1531-32 beyond the mouth of the Meta River but was blocked by the rapids at Atures. On his return he clashed with Antonio Sedeno, governor of Trinidad, who, also having designs on Meta, overstepped his legal jurisdiction to build a fort in Paria north of the Orinoco Delta. Sedeno imprisoned Ordaz in Cumana, and he died, possibly poisoned, on a voyage back to Spain.

The Crown appointed a new Governor of Paria, Jeronimo Ortal, who diligently explored the interior for Meta between 1532 and 1537. Ortal too quarrelled with Sedeno, though for a time they attempted to unite their forces. In 1535 he ordered Captain Alonso de Herrera to move inland by the waters of the Uyapari. Herrera, who had accompanied Ordaz three years before, explored the Meta River but was killed by Achagua Indians near its banks while waiting out the winter rains in Casanare.

Meanwhile, the Welsers in Coro were mounting rival expeditions. While Ambrose Ehinger (known as Ambrosio Alfinger) the first Welser governor (1529-1533), reconnoitered Lake Maracaibo and the Magdalena Valley, his lieutenant, Federmann, pursued the kingdom in the opposite direction. Leaving Coro in 1530, he passed through the present states of Falc6n and Lara as he followed the foothills of the Andes to the Portuguesa River before turning back. After Ehinger's death, in 1533, Federmann continued as second in command to the new governor, Georg Hohermuth (known as Jorge de Espira). He remained in Coro while Hohermuth took up the search.

In 1534 Hohermuth set off for the hinterland with some four hundred men. From Barquisimeto his troops marched to the llanos of Arauca, where winter flooding forced them to camp for three months. When the waters subsided, they proceeded south through Casanare in a perilous journey plagued by debilitating heat, mosquitoes, disease, and hostile Indians. After fording the Meta River they came upon an Indian town at the foot of the Andean Cordillera not far from the site of the present-day village of San Juan de Arama, which Hohermuth called Nuestra Senora de la Asunci6n. He wanted to explore beyond the Ariari River, but its depth prevented easy crossing. At last, discouraged by floods, sickness, and conflicts with the Indians, he returned to Coro in 1538 --the first European to traverse the llanos completely, but he had failed to find El Dorado.

Back in Coro, Federmann had grown tired of waiting. In 1536 he struck out on his own initiative around Lake Maracaibo, keeping to the east of Hohermuth's route, but with the Andes looming on the right to guide him. At Barquisimeto he veered eastward into the plains to avoid colliding with his chief. Zigzagging south, he reached the Orinoco somewhere east of its junction with the Apure, where he incorporated into his band some renegades who had deserted the Ortal expedition the year before. After roaming about the llanos for a year without uncovering a trace of El Dorado, Federmann turned west and crossed the Metal As Hohermuth had done before him, he rested in Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion, which he renamed Nuestra Sehora de la Fragua (Our Lady of the Forge) be- cause he ordered a forge built there to make tools and to shoe horses. He wasted the rest of 1538 in a futile effort to find a route through the rugged Cordillera that would lead to the Chibcha highlands.

Early in 1539 Federmann rallied his exhausted men to challenge the icecrested mountains again. This time, at the Indian settlement of Pasacorte, they found a pass through the paramo of Sumapaz. The bizarre finale to Federmann's odyssey was played out on the Plains of Bogota where, after three years of tramping through tropical and mountainous wilderness, the luckless German discovered not only the Chibcha domain but the forces of two Spanish rivals who had arrived before him, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesa- da and Sebastian Benalcazar.

Federmann's failure to locate either the strait to Asia or the mythical El Dorado left the way open for another German expedition. Philipp von Hutten, Coro governor in 1540, had accompanted Hohermuth in 1534 and believed that the kingdom lay southeast nf that route. Hutten left Coro in August 1541 with 550 men. He took the now familiar itinerary through Barquisimeto, the llanos of Apure, Arauca, and Casanare, to arrive at Nuestra Senora de la Fragua. Here he intended to camp for the winter, but when the Indians told him that Hernan Perez de Quesada, the brother of Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, had recently been through the town on the same quest, Hutten threw caution to the wind and set out immediately on Perez's trail to the south. For the next year he wandered through the jungles of Caqueta, a journey from nowhere to nowhere, conducted through difficult terrain made virtually impassable by the heavy rains.

When Hutten finally struggled back to La Fragua the Indians convinced him that El Dorado was to the southeast in the Vaupes region and that its capital was a city called Macatoa. With forty of his strongest men he crossed the Guaviare and found the town, which turned out to be of respectable size but notably lacking in golden houses The Macatoans, however, insisted that El Dorado was the capital of their neighbors, the Omagua. They led Hutten into Omagua territory, and a climb up a hill overlooking the city in question convinced him that the prize was within his grasp. It was so large that he could not see its farthest end. The streets were straight, the houses well constructed, and in the central plaza stood a building of great height. Hutten impetuously charged the city, but the Omagua repulsed the attack, wounding him and many others. Realizing his vulnerability, Hutten resolved to go back to Coro to enlist reinforcements. Bad news awaited him at La Fragua, for the Indians reported that a Spanish rebel, Juan de Carvajal, had seized power in Coro. Hutten took precautions, but on reaching the coast fell into the hands of Carvajal, who had him beheaded in 1546.

Hutten's trek was the last sponsored by the Welsers, who were now convinced that there was no South Sea passage in the interior. Nevertheless his discovery of the Omagua city reinforced belief in El Dorado and diverted the future search for it by Venezuelan-based Spaniards from the llanos to northwestern Brazil and the headwaters of the Negro River.

Meanwhile adventurers coming from the Coiombian highlands had been vying with the Germans to be the first to find the kingdom in the plains. It is ironic that having defeated the Chibcha in 1539 and dredged Lake Guatavita for gold, the Spaniards refused to believe that this was indeed the site of the El Dorado that they were seeking. The Quesada brothers speculated that their objective lay east of the Chibcha plateau, since they had explored the country to the west and north and Benalcazar had come from the south. Overlooking that Federmann had already spent three years in just this area, they decided that El Dorado must be in a yet undiscovered mountain range east of the Andes. With unquenchable hope, Hernan Perez de Quesada in 1541-42, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada in 1569-72, and Antonio de Berrio in 1584-85 and 159092 sought the elusive kingdom in the llanos.

When Jimenez de Quesada left Santa Fe de Bogota with Benalcazar and Federmann in 1539 to place their claims on the former Chibcha domain before the King of Spain, Hernan Perez stayed behind as head of the nascent colony. Perez lost little time in preparing to visit the plains. By 1541 he had assembled an expedition of 430 Spaniards on foot and horseback and eight thousand Indians. To ensure peace in the highlands he summarily executed the Chibcha cacique in Tunja. Of his actions after leaving Tunja, the chroniclers have left conflicting accounts.

J. M. Groot, the great nineteenth century Colombian historian, suggests that Perez crossed the Cordillera through the paramo of Fosca. "It is impossible," he adds, "to imagine the labor needed to pass through those rugged and stony mountains, through woods, swamps, and marshes covered by thick fog and penetrated by cold." Scores of Indians and horses had died by the time Perez arrived at La Fragua.

Taking Hohermuth's route, he pushed south to the Guaviare. The heat was ghastly and the Indians were antagonistic. After all the horses died, Perez drove his men forward on foot. At Caqueta, having lost many lives, he at last began his return to Santa Fe de Bogota. Over a year after their journey had begun, Perez and a handful of survivors lurched into Bogota like walking shadows.

Taking up residence in Santa Fe in 1550, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada was undismayed by the debacle. Almost immediately he began petitioning Philip II for permission to explore the llanos. The authorization came in 1568. Appointing him adelaritado of New Granada, the King granted Jimenez de Quesada the governorship of four hundred leagues of land in the plains between the Pauto and Caqueta rivers, and promised him the coveted title of marquis after he had conquered and settled El Dorado. Despite his advanced age of nearly seventy years, he had no difficulty in attracting recruits for his campaign. Veterans of the Chibcha war twenty years before vied with younger men for a place in the ranks. In 1569 he marched out of the little highland capital with three hundred Spaniards, an unknown number of women, fifteen hundred Indians, herds of cattle, and supplies worth thirteen thousand golden pesos.

Like his brother, Jimenez de Quesada suffered staggering casualties in a six-month journey through the cordillera. After resting at La Fragua he led his people south through the waist high sharp-edged grass that stretched to th horizon. Mosquitos, horseflies, an. sand flies buzzed ominously-thei bites bringing fevers and swellings. I summer the heat was intolerable, and during the rainy season it seemed a though the flesh would rot from the bones. Still he marched on. At last near the junction of the Guaviare anc Orinoco rivers where the village of Sar Fernando de Atabapo stands today, his men refused to continue. After two years of excruciating travel they have found no gold, pearls, great populations, or cultivated fields, but endless plains and dense jungles. Reluctantly he turned back. In 1572 he reappeared in Santa Fe de Bogota, accompanied by the sad remnant of his once proud force-twenty-four Spaniards, four Indians, and eighteen half-starved horses.

In his biography, The Knight of El Dorado, the Colombian writer, German Arciniegas compares Jimenez de Quesada with the celebrated sixteenth century literary character Don Quixote. Certainly his gaunt figure and flowing beard were very like those of the knight of La Mancha. The taking on in his old age of an enterprise more risky than his youthful conquest of the Chibcha was a scheme worthy of Cervantes' hero. Arciniegas argues that Jimenez de Quesada's madness was the madness of the age, which turned all values upside down. Yet, none laughed at him in 1572-rather, the people of Santa Fe de Bogota merely said that it was his misfortune to have looked for the kingdom in the wrong place. He himself still believed that E1 Dorado existed. At his death in 1579 Antonio de Berrio inherited from him, along with his titles and property, the will to continue the quest.

Berrio launched the last major expedition to the llanos from the Andean highlands. He left Tunja in January 1584 with one hundred men. He theorized that the kingdom lay near the mouth of the Orinoco River since none had yet explored that area, although Ordaz and Herrera had passed through it. Crossing the Pauto, he pushed eastward through the llanos between the Meta and Vichada rivers. East of the Orinoco he spied the Sierra Mapicha. Convinced that E1 Dorado was somewhere in these mountains, he retraced his steps to Tunja and completed the entire trip with only eight fatalities in a record seventeen months.

Berrio made two more attempts. Between 1585and 1587 he searched the Sierra Mapicha but desisted when one of his captains mutinied. In 1590 he began again, this time with broader powers as the officially recognized governor of E1 Dorado and Guayana. After exploring the Orinoco and Caroni rivers he founded Santo Tome de Guayana, but in 1595 he was captured by Sir Walter Ralegh and died soon afterward, leaving the Englishman to carry on the quest in north central South America.

It would seem that by the end of the sixteenth century Europeans had proved conclusively that E1 Dorado was not located in the llanos. They had explored the plains from all directions, sailed the treacherous rivers, fought with Indians, and endured nameless terrors, but had not found the mythical kingdom. Yet, despite their repeated failures to discover wealth of any kind, the conviction survived that the llanos contained fabulous riches. The men who continued to go there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in search of Meta, in the nineteenth century sought their fortunes with little more success in cattle ranching or cacao plantations. In our own times the lure of petroleum has triggered renewed interest. Multinational corporations have cut roads through the uninhabited tracts, but they have yet to uncover commercially profitable oil deposits in this region, referred to today as "the future of Colombia." The content may change, but the myth of El Dorado dies hard. It is the leit-motif of the history of the llanos.