El Dorado did not begin as a city. The name means the Golden One, and it referred to a Muisca ruler in the high Andes of modern Colombia who was coated in resin and gold dust, rowed to the center of Lake Guatavita, and washed clean while his people threw gold and emeralds into the water. This episode explains how Europeans steeped in myths of golden utopias turned that ritual into a phantom metropolis that redrew the map of South America.

It follows Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada tracing the salt trade up the Magdalena River to the Muisca in 1537, the improbable meeting of three rival armies that ended in a legal contract and the founding of Bogotá, and the psychological break that pushed the legend east when the loot fell short of expectations. It covers Gonzalo Pizarro's torture-filled march, Francisco de Orellana's accidental descent of the  ...