Eldorado

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Eldorado ( Spanish El Dorado "The Golden") is a fabulous gold country in the interior of northern South America . The name "El Dorado" originally referred to a man, later a city and then an entire country. Other ( indigenous ) names for this mythological place are e.g. B. Manóa or Omagua .

Eldorado is based on a Colombian legend that aroused a thirst for adventure among the conquistadors of the 16th century and on the basis of which numerous expeditions to the unexplored Central South America were organized. Spanish chroniclers have been reporting on the supposed gold country since the 17th century .

Legend

Eldorado gold raft

Every new ruler of the Muisca (a Chibcha people) made a sacrifice for the sun god in the mountain lake of Guatavita near present-day Bogotá when he took office . Bonfires were lit at night and the prince's naked body was coated with a paste of gold dust . Together with four noblemen, the prince went on a raft to the middle of the lake. The raft was loaded with a variety of gold objects and precious stones. The Companions sacrificed these items by throwing them into the water. After that the king jumped into the lake and the gold dust on his body sank to the bottom along with emeralds and gold . Another variant lets the king wash off the gold at the edge of the lake after the ceremony.

The gold raft of Eldorado is evidence of the legend .

Origin of the Myth

When the Spaniards arrived, the Muisca custom was no longer practiced for a long time, but the stories of the captured Muisca fueled the greed of the conquistadors for the supposedly gigantic treasure . Above all, the conquest of the Inca Empire by Francisco Pizarro from 1531 onwards , during which an enormous treasure of gold fell into his hands (the ransom for the Inca ruler Atahualpa , who was imprisoned and later murdered by the Spaniards ), fired the imagination of the conquerors with regard to others , supposedly undiscovered treasures.

In particular the writings of Rodriguez Freyle , who was based on descriptions of Don Juan, the nephew of the last ruler of the region around Guatavita, as well as the reports of the poet and chronicler Juan de Castellanos (1522 to 1606), who served as a cavalry soldier in Venezuela from around 1545 later contributed to the development of the legend of the legendary gold country Eldorado. The search for Eldorado was even one of the main driving forces behind the exploration and conquest of South America by the Spaniards. In reality, however, this legend originated in Quito around 1541 , only several years after the Muisca had been defeated by the Spanish adventurer Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada .

Localization attempts and expeditions

Over time, the Spaniards moved Eldorado from the mountain lake Guatavita to different places. Sometimes Eldorado was a huge temple, sometimes a city sunk in the jungle, and in 1595 the English navigator and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh reported about the fabulously rich kingdom of "Eldorado", which he suspected to be somewhere between the Amazon and Peru . He relied on the records of the Spanish conquistador and later governor of Trinidad Antonio de Berrio , who had undertaken three expeditions between 1584 and 1595 along the course of the Orinoco and into southwestern Guiana .

  • In the 16th century, Eldorado was “relocated” to the mythical Parime Lake in the Spanish Guiana . The same lake first appeared on maps by the Flemish cartographer Jodocus Hondius around 1587 and was located in southwestern Guiana. The legend of Lake Parime was probably based on the assumptions of Antonio de Berrio (see above). In this context, the name Manóa was used for the first time, whereby a town on the banks of this lake was referred to. In the course of the 17th century the lake was shown in different shapes (sometimes almost circular, sometimes almost rectangular) and in different places on maps - sometimes well south of the equator . This lake was still to be found on maps in the 18th century, for example those of the French researcher Charles Marie de La Condamine and those of the German-born Jesuit missionary Samuel Fritz . The fact is, however, that this lake - unlike Lake Guatavita - never existed.
  • As part of the pledge of Little Venice (on the area of ​​today's Venezuela) to the Welser (1528 to 1546) by Emperor Charles V , German adventurers also looked for the legendary gold country. An expedition under the governor Georg Hohermuth von Speyer and Philipp von Hutten between 1535 and 1538, which penetrated into the area between Rio Japurá and the upper reaches of the Río Meta , was unsuccessful, with around 200 of the 400 participants in the expedition perishing . A second search by Huttens (1541 to 1545) was also unsuccessful.
  • 1536 to 1539: The Spanish conquistadors Sebastián de Belalcázar and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada advanced independently of one another into the territory of the Chibcha Empire and into what is now central Colombia. Their search was also unsuccessful, but they lost almost two thirds of their crews and the majority of their Indian porters.
  • In the 1540s Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana were looking for Eldorado in the river basin of South America, including both looking along the upper reaches of the Río Napo . They discovered the Amazon on their Cinnamon Land expedition .
  • In 1559 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada set out from Bogotá on a second expedition towards the upper reaches of the Orinoco . The venture ended in complete disaster in 1562: Not only did the expedition fail, only 64 out of about 1,300 Spaniards survived. The rest of them succumbed to fevers, died of starvation or died in fighting with indigenous peoples.
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Reception in popular culture

literature

Movies

Computer games

Board games

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: Eldorado  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Historia natural, civil y geográfica de las naciones situadas en las riveras del río Orinoco / By Padre Joseph Gumilla (story about the legend of the city of Manóa) (Spanish)
  2. ↑ In Search of El Dorado by Harry Collingwood (English)
  3. ↑ Eldorado Legendary Country from Encyclopædia Britannica (English)
  4. ↑ Descola, Jean: The legendary Eldorado . In: The last secrets of our world . Verlag DAS BESTE GmbH, Stuttgart 1977, p. 30.
  5. ↑ Descola: Eldorado , p. 36.
  6. ↑ Schneider, Christina: The legend of the realm of gold . In: GEO epoch No. 71: South America. History of a continent. (2015), p. 36ff.
  7. ↑ Descola: Eldorado , p. 34.
  8. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/217372/quest-el-dorado
  9. ↑ https://www.spiel-des-jahres.com/de/wettlauf-nach-el-dorado
  10. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/216459/lost-expedition
  11. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230191/island-el-dorado/credits