The Muisca raft and El Dorado: Bogotá, D.C.

The Muisca raft and El Dorado: Bogotá, D.C.

The Europeans who came to America at the beginning of the 16th century brought a desire: they were looking for gold, the metal that in Europe was currency, the one they needed to pay for their ships, weapons and horses and, if there was excess, to become very rich. They were looking for Eldorado, a mythical place where everything is made of gold. And they found indigenous chiefs and chiefs who adorned themselves with nose rings, pectorals and "crowns" of gold; they plundered, plundered, mistreated, because in their century they could not see the value of what they were destroying in their wake.

But they also heard about a cacique so rich that he did not want to wear carved ornaments, but to cover his body with dust of the metal sacred to him, to shine like the sun that symbolizes and makes life possible. Upon arriving in Bogotá, among the Muiscas, they learned that the Guatavita cacique was celebrating a ceremony thus covered in gold, on a raft in the center of a lagoon. The Golden!

Neither conquerors nor adventurers ever witnessed the ceremony of the chieftain bathed in gold dust, but the legend of El Dorado accompanied the history of the Guatavita lagoon for centuries . The Gold Museum, in Bogotá, preserves an object made by ancient goldsmiths that represents this sacred ritual in detail: the Muisca raft.

It was not in Guatavita, however, that the legend came to life, but in Siecha. In 1856, the brothers Joaquín and Bernardino Tovar partially drained this lagoon and found a votive figure in the shape of a raft that they immediately associated with the El Dorado ceremony as described by the chroniclers.

The Siecha raft ended up in the hands of diplomat Salomon Koppel, who sold it, legally at the time, to a museum in Germany, but it was destroyed in a fire upon reaching the port of Bremen.

More than a century later, in 1969, Father Jaime Hincapié Santamaría, parish priest of Pasca, Cundinamarca, received a visit from Cruz María Dimaté, a peasant who, in the company of his son, had found some pieces of gold and ceramics in a cave in the moor between the paths of El Retiro and Lázaro Fonte.

Father Hincapié showed him the illustration of Siecha's raft in the book El Dorado by Liborio Zerda , and the peasant confirmed its resemblance to the pieces he had found. Aware of its importance, the parish priest managed to mediate for the Banco de la República to acquire the piece offered by the Muiscas in Pasca and preserve it for all Colombians. Known as the Muisca raft, it was exhibited in the recently inaugurated Gold Museum building. It soon became a national emblem, and the Bank published it on banknotes.

This finding reinforced the imaginary around the Guatavita lagoon, which became an important pilgrimage center. In 2006, during the construction of the path that surrounds it, a worker found a ceramic container under the ground containing four pre-Columbian pieces. Not knowing what to do, he put the jewelry in his pocket. The rumor spread quickly among the neighbors, who told him: "These pieces do not belong to you or to the CAR, they are heritage of our culture," so he decided to hand them over to the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History.

The Regional Autonomous Corporation -CAR-, in charge of this reserve, decided to suspend the work in the lagoon and notified ICANH of the finding so that authorized archaeologists could investigate the place and make the corresponding decisions for the protection of the archaeological heritage. An example of what all Colombians must do.

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