El Dorado Trivia
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49 free El Dorado trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This El Dorado trivia quiz covers the myth of the golden city from a chief powdered in gold dust to a lake that stayed on maps for a century without existing. The easy questions ask what el Dorado literally means, which continent the legend belongs to, which people it is associated with, which sacred lake received their offerings and which animated film sent two con men looking for it. Then it works through the conquistadors: Dalfinger and Federmann for the Welsers, Quesada's salt trail into the highlands, the three armies that met at Bogotá, and the first written appearance of the phrase in 1539. The hard end is for people who like their history tangled: the tumbaga alloy of Muisca gold, the raft found in a cave in 1969, the 1562 licence to drain Guatavita, Orellana abandoning Pizarro and sailing the Amazon, Philipp von Hutten and the Omagua, Aguirre's mutiny and letter to Philip II, Berrio's three expeditions, Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana and fatal second voyage, Lake Parime, Humboldt's debunking, Voltaire's Candide and Poe's poem. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on El Dorado, the Muisca raft, Lake Guatavita, Lope de Aguirre, Walter Raleigh and The Road to El Dorado before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our conquistadors, Colombia and lost cities quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The name 'el Dorado' originally referred to what?
A gold-dusted ruler
A gold-dusted ruler: Spanish reports told of a chief who was coated in gold dust and washed it off in a sacred lake. Only later did the name pass to a lost city of gold.
Q 02The Muisca, the goldworking people behind the El Dorado legend, lived in the highlands of which modern country?
Colombia
Colombia's eastern highlands were the Muisca homeland. To them gold was less wealth than a gift for the gods: by one expert's estimate, more than half of what they made was cast to be given away as offerings.
Q 03Besides gold, which gemstones did the Muisca throw into their sacred lakes as offerings?
Emeralds
Emeralds came from the Muisca's own mountains. The Spaniards tracked down the mines within months of arriving, but for all their efforts prised out only a few stones.
Q 04Where is the Muisca raft, the centrepiece of the El Dorado story, now kept?
Museo del Oro
Museo del Oro holds it. The little raft carries a chief surrounded by attendants, matching the old written accounts so closely that it is often cited as evidence the ceremony really happened.
Q 05Most Muisca 'gold' was really tumbaga, an alloy of gold mixed mainly with which other metal?
Copper
Copper, sometimes with a little silver: the mix melts at a lower temperature than either metal alone and is harder than copper, which suited the Muisca's casting.
Q 06The Muisca's most sacred temple, at Sogamoso, was dedicated to which heavenly body?
The Sun
The Sun, whose god the Muisca called Sué. Gold mattered to them less as wealth than for its sun-like lustre, which is why so much of it was made only to be given away.
Q 07Emperor Charles V handed the governorship of which future country to the Welsers, a German banking family, as security for a loan?
Venezuela
Venezuela became 'Klein-Venedig', Little Venice, in 1528. The bankers' governors spent their time hunting gold in the interior, and in 1546 a Welser heir was beheaded there by a Spanish rival.
Q 08Which everyday trade good did Quesada's men follow like a trail up into the Muisca's mountains?
Salt
Salt cakes traded down to the lowlands told Quesada that a richer society lay uphill. The Muisca, known as the Salt People, produced plenty of it; the gold they were famous for had to be traded in.
Q 09Where was Walter Raleigh held for over a decade before being let out in 1616 for one last hunt for El Dorado?
The Tower of London
The Tower of London held him from 1603 on a treason conviction, and he used the years to write a history of the world. The death sentence was never lifted, as he learned when the voyage failed.
Q 10From which city did Gonzalo Pizarro march east in 1541 on a disastrous search for El Dorado?
Quito
Quito had been in Spanish hands for only seven years. Pizarro marched out with an army of thousands, found no golden kingdom and could not feed his men, who were soon threatening mutiny.
Q 11On which Caribbean island did Walter Raleigh capture the El Dorado hunter Antonio de Berrio in 1595?
Trinidad
Trinidad was the old conquistador's base for a final push up the Orinoco. Raleigh stormed his town, questioned him about the golden city and then set off upriver to find it himself.
Q 12Which Latin pop star released the Grammy-winning 2017 album El Dorado?
Shakira
Shakira's El Dorado World Tour had to be put back by months when she suffered a vocal-cord haemorrhage, and the album went on to win her third Grammy, for Best Latin Pop Album.
Q 13How was the Muisca's most sacred temple, at Sogamoso, destroyed during the Spanish conquest?
Looters' torches set it alight
Q 21Gonzalo Pizarro's 1541 expedition in search of El Dorado was also lured by reports of a valley full of which spice?
Cinnamon
Cinnamon turned out to be a few scattered trees. The expedition pushed on towards El Dorado, ran out of food, and the boat sent ahead to find some ended up sailing the whole length of the Amazon.
Q 22Which of Gonzalo Pizarro's officers went downriver for food and ended up the first European to sail the length of the Amazon?
Francisco Orellana
Francisco Orellana was expected back within twelve days. Unable to return against the current, he sailed on for months and came out into the Atlantic, carrying tales of rich peoples along the banks.
Q 23Which Hollywood star played the gunfighter in Howard Hawks's 1966 Western El Dorado, opposite Robert Mitchum?
Looters' torches set it alight: two soldiers crept in at night to strip the gold and started the fire by accident. A full-size replica now stands in Sogamoso's archaeology museum.
Q 14Which city was formally founded in April 1539 with three rival conquistadors, Quesada, Belalcázar and Federmann, all present?
Bogotá
Bogotá rose on the Muisca plateau where three armies, each hunting a land of gold, had converged from three directions. Its airport is still called El Dorado.
Q 15Which US state named one of its original counties El Dorado, after gold was found there in 1848?
California
California's gold rush began at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. When the state's first counties were drawn two years later, the one around the mill was given the legend's name.
Q 16Which ancient technique did Muisca goldsmiths use to make their finely detailed offering figures?
Lost-wax casting
Lost-wax casting: each figure was modelled in beeswax and cased in clay, then the wax was melted out to leave a mould for the molten metal. What looks like fine wire soldered on was cast in one piece, from threads of wax.
Q 17Which singer wrote and performed the songs for the 2000 animated film The Road to El Dorado, with lyrics by Tim Rice?
Elton John
Elton John and Tim Rice had written the songs for The Lion King six years earlier. This time John is heard as well as credited: he narrates the story in song at intervals throughout the film.
Q 18How did merchant Antonio de Sepúlveda try to reach the gold in Lake Guatavita in the late 1500s?
By draining it
By draining it: his workers cut a great notch in the rim, and the falling water exposed gold along the shore. Then the cut collapsed, the lake began to refill and the hunt was abandoned.
Q 19The golden Muisca raft was found in 1969 hidden where?
A cave
A cave in the hills, where local people found it inside a clay pot. An earlier golden raft, found at a lake in 1856, was lost in a fire, so this is the only one that survives.
Q 20In Muisca myth the mother goddess Bachué rose from a lake and returned to it as what?
A serpent
A serpent: in the story she peopled the earth, then slipped back into the water with her husband, both of them turned to snakes. Lakes were holy places to the Muisca, and gifts of gold were left at their shores.
John Wayne
John Wayne's gunfighter comes to the aid of Mitchum's drunken sheriff. Only the title is borrowed from the legend, and the plot is one Hawks filmed three times, starting with Rio Bravo.
Q 24Which American carmaker sold a luxury model called the Eldorado for fifty years from 1952?
Cadillac
Cadillac chose the name in an in-house competition for a show car marking its own golden anniversary. The Eldorado stayed in its range until 2002.
Q 25Why did Charles V halt every El Dorado expedition in 1550?
To debate whether conquest was just
To debate whether conquest was just: at Valladolid a panel of theologians heard a Dominican friar argue that the Indigenous peoples deserved the same rights as their conquerors. Both sides claimed to have won.
Q 26Which mutineer murdered Pedro de Ursúa in 1561, styled himself 'Wrath of God' and declared war on Philip II?
Lope de Aguirre
Lope de Aguirre, nicknamed El Loco, dropped the search for El Dorado, sailed down the Amazon to the sea and set out to seize Peru from the king. His own men killed him at Barquisimeto.
Q 27Which director took Klaus Kinski into the Peruvian jungle to film a conquistador's hunt for El Dorado?
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog shot it in five weeks on Amazon tributaries, clashing with his raging star throughout. He later admitted the storyline was fiction, only loosely hung on a real mutineer.
Q 28Which video game series opened in 2007 with a treasure hunter's search for El Dorado?
Uncharted
Uncharted began in 2007 with Drake's Fortune, in which the hero, who claims descent from Sir Francis Drake, learns that El Dorado is not a city at all but a huge golden idol.
Q 29German explorers sent inland by the Welser bankers around 1530 hoped to find a passage to which ocean?
The Pacific
The Pacific, then called the South Sea: a way through the continent would have opened a new route to India's spices. What the explorers brought back instead were rumours of gold in the mountains.
Q 30Antonio de Berrio, heir to the conquistador Quesada, believed El Dorado lay in the highlands of which region beyond the Orinoco?
The Guianas
The Guianas drew Berrio into one expedition after another across the plains and down the Orinoco. Captives told him of a great lake there called Manoa, and the hunt became his life's work.