Lake Guatavita

This guide to Lake Guatavita, outside Bogotá, opens with hundreds of laborers cutting a channel through crater rock to drain the lake by twenty meters, chasing a legend that had already ruined generations of treasure hunters. It traces that legend back to a Muisca ritual, a zipa covered in gold dust who paddled to the center of the lake and washed clean while his people threw gold and emeralds into the water, and how the Spanish shortened the story into two words: el dorado. You'll hear about the Spanish merchant Antonio de Sepúlveda's canal, the crew before him who tried bucket relays for months, and an English company that returned around 1911. Stand at the crater's rim and look down at the still water below.