SOURCE: Silverberg, Robert. “The Gilded Man of Cundinamarca.” In The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado, pp. 3-38. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Silverberg establishes how Spaniards could have believed in El Dorado by describing the riches in gold accumulated by explorers like Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro.

The quest for El Dorado was an enterprise of fantasy that obsessed the adventurers of Europe for more than a century. Tales of a golden kingdom and of a golden king, somewhere in the unexplored wilderness of South America, spurred men on to notable achievements of endurance, chivalry, and—too often—crime. Nothing halted the pursuers of the golden dream, neither snow-capped mountains nor blazing plains, neither the thin air of lofty plateaus nor the green intricacy of steaming tropical jungles. They marched on, killing and plundering, suffering incredible torments, often traveling—as one chronicler put it...