By: Ana María Zabala
By the end of the XVI century, Europe was on a constant quest for commercial routes to Asia since there was constant news on the richness of their kingdoms. The Catholic Kings, in an expansionist frenzy that sought to dominate all of the Iberian peninsula, financed the first voyage of Cristopher Columbus with the purpose of finding the shortest route to Asia or “the Indies”. At the same time, the Kings ordered the forced conversion to Christianity from Muslims and Jews in the Iberian peninsula.
Columbus’ vessel met with the present-day Caribbean islands, marking the beginning of the pillaging and suffering of these lands wrongly named “America.” To this day, we name a whole continent after a Florentine dealer just because he realized these were different lands—that these were not “the Indies”. Why not name these lands with the languages that were already there?
Columbus named the island that we know today as Haiti and Dominican Republic as “Hispaniola”—seizing its name to illegitimately take control of it. The Taínos of that island offered to trade gold with the Europeans in exchange for glass beads, fabrics and other objects. In his letters to the Catholic Kings, Columbus wrote about the possible existence of gold mines in the island. The absence of huge gold deposits in the Antilles frustrated Columbus’ quest. However, his accounts on the richness of what he called “the islands of the Indies” propagated across Europe and set the stage for the search for El Dorado.
The gold rush in Colombia took on the sinister form of tomb looting—guaquería.
The gold fever started with the subjugation and plundering of two of Abya Yala’s biggest empires: the Aztec and the Inca. In 1519, Hernán Cortés and his entourage stole the gold treasures collected by the emperor and the Aztec nobles. Once the loot was taken and divided up, they established silver mines in Mexican territory since there were no significant gold deposits. In 1531, Francisco Pizarro encountered the powerful Inca empire, with its temples covered in gold sheets and other majestic richness that made the colonizers delirious with greed. Pizarro and his retinue arrested the head of the incas Atahualpa. The Inca empire paid for his rescue in silver and gold that filled up a space of 8 meters long by 6 meters wide. Even so, the Spaniards assassinated him. The looting of the Inca empire was unparalleled in the history of the colonization of Abya Yala.
In the first years of the XVI century, there were existing settlements of peninsular colonists in the Atlantic coast of present-day Colombia. The search for gold took on a particularly macabre form. Since there were no great empires in these lands, their peoples didn’t collect sumptuous treasures like the Incas or Aztecs. In fact, the majority of their gold pieces were not even exhibited. Generation after generation of these ancient peoples buried gold with their dead. Here, the gold rush took on the sinister form of tomb looting—guaquería. The lands of the Sinú river where the first to see their tombs stripped of their sacred elements. From there on, this wicked phenomenon expanded to all of the regions of the country with such force that the Spanish Crown promulgated special legislation for “the exploitation of tomb gold”. Centuries later, in the 1800s, guaquería became a profession adopted by peasants who found a livelihood in it.
With the plundering of the Incas, Aztecs, and tombs, stories in the Inerian Peninsula emerged that talked of legendary Dorados: extraordinarily rich sites. The colonizers identified one of these Dorados with a ceremony done by the Muisca people in the Guatavita lagoon, in the central mountainous region of Colombia:
The ceremony that this involved was that in that lake a large raft of reeds was made, adorned and garnished all the showiest they could. . .They stripped the heir in live flesh and anointed it with a sticky earth and sprinkled it with powdered and ground gold, in such a way that he was all covered with this metal. . . The golden Indian made his offer by throwing all the gold he had at his feet in the middle of the lake, and the other chiefs who escorted and accompanied him, did the same. Once finished, they lowered the flag, which was raised all the time that the offer had lasted, and leaving the raftashore, the shout, bagpipes and fotutos began with very long riffs of cavorts and dances in their own way; with such ceremony they received the new elect by lord and prince.
Juan Rodríguez Freyle, in Santa Fe de Bogotá, 1636
oil and collage on wood with digital image projection of goldsmithing piece “La Balsa Muisca”, exhibited in the Museo del Oro of Bogota.
However, it wasn’t in Guatavita that this legend came to life, but in the Siecha lagoons in the mountain peaks of Chingaza. The Spaniards called these high mountain ecosystems in the tropical Andes páramos, which in Spanish describes a forsaken terrain, because they saw them as impoverished lands. But here is where the majority of the rivers that run through the tropical and subtropical Andes spring from and they are sacred and ceremonial lands for the Muisca and other peoples.
In 1856, Joaquín and Bernardino Tovar partially emptied this lagoon and found a votive figure in the shape of a raft that they associated with the El Dorado ceremony. Salomon Koppel, german consul at the time, sold it to a museum in Germany but it was destroyed in a fire reaching Bremen’s port. More than a century later, in 1969, Jaime Hincapié Santamaría, a priest in the town Pasca, Cundinamarca, was visited by Cruz María Dimaté, a farmer who found gold and ceramic pieces in a cave in the páramo that resembled El Dorado. These are the pieces exhibited in the Gold Museum of Bogotá and they are known as Balsa Muisca (Muisca Raft).
For various indigenous peoples in Colombia, gold is the vital energy of father sun while lakes are the womb of mother earth. In the ritual that the Spaniards called El Dorado, the golden chief offered gold to bodies of water to renew life in this planet.1 Western thought reduced this mineral of great spiritual value to its monetary worth. Many of these sacred gold pieces don’t exist anymore because they were looted and melted into gold ingots that were sent to Europe.
El Dorado became a delirious mirage that would motivate dispossession and the incessant exploitation of gold and silver mines, in which indigenous peoples were forced to labour, and for which Europeans kidnapped and enslaved African peoples. Up to this day, Abya Yala and its peoples continue to be the mined territories by the Global North—former empires that owe their power to the territories they have pillaged for centuries.
Notes
- According to the archeologist Roberto Lleras Perez, the muisca people devoted more than 50% of their goldsmithing pieces for offerings to sacred sites.
References
Plazas de Nieto, C., & Falchetti, A. M. (1979). La orfebrería prehispánica de Colombia. Boletín Museo Del Oro, (3), 1-53. Retrieved from https://publicaciones.banrepcultural.org/index.php/bmo/article/view/7354
Vargas Martínez, Gustavo. (1934). Americo Vespucio: El Primer Nombre. Retrieved fromhttps://www.banrepcultural.org/biblioteca-virtual/credencial-historia/numero-29/americo-vespucio-500-anos-del-descubrimiento-de-america
Diosa Vargas, J., Saldarriaga Rendón, J.C. & Marín Alzate, J. A. (2016). Guaquería, la historia oculta bajo tierra. El Espectador. Retrieved from https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/nacional/guaqueria-la-historia-oculta-bajo-tierra/
Banco de la República. La balsa muisca y el Dorado. Retrieved from https://www.banrepcultural.org/coleccion-arqueologica/balsa-muisca
Cooper, Jago. El Dorado: The truth behind the myth. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20964114
Rodríguez Freyle, Juan. 1979 [1636–1638]. El Carnero. Bodout, Medellín.
