El Dorado (chief)

El Dorado (chief) (Spanish, “The Gilded One”), term applied in the Americas by the 16th-century Spanish explorers to the legendary chief of a Native American tribe said to inhabit a region in the northern part of South America. In Native American mythology, the chief was enormously wealthy. At yearly festivals he would cover his entire body with gold dust. The term came to be applied also to his kingdom, supposedly abounding in gold and precious stones. His fabled golden city was sometimes referred to in the legend as Manoa or Omoa. The stories inspired the Spanish to expend vast sums in sending out exploring parties, most of which returned decimated by privation and disease. The most celebrated expedition was that of the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana, who went down the Amazon River to its mouth in 1541 and 1542 in an unsuccessful attempt to find the city. The German adventurer Philip von Hutten in 1541 led an exploring party from Coro, a German settlement on the Venezuelan coast, and searched as far as the Omagua region, near the Amazon River. In 1595 the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh took up the search and, upon his return to England, published a romantic account of his voyage, in which he described Manoa as being on an island in Parimá Lake, in Guiana. For more than two centuries, until the existence of the lake was disproved, it was marked on maps. The name El Dorado has come to be applied to any place of fabulous wealth or of opportunities for acquiring sudden wealth. In literature, and especially in poetry, frequent references have been made to the legend.