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 Reports of the Guatavita
treasure continued to reach the Spaniards from all sides. The ruler of
the town of Simijaca attested that, in the days of his predecessor, lie
had personally accompanied a caravan of forty Indians, loaded with gold,
which they threw into the lake. Other local chiefs had also sent
offerings, and, in corroboration of these stories, the Spaniards
themselves had found a few gold items in the shallows. Having robbed the
living Indians of most of their gold, it was time to attack the richest
treasure of all.
About 1545, an attempt to drain the lake was made by Heman
Perez de
Quesada. During the dry season he formed a bucket chain of laborers with
gourd jars, and after three months' work managed to lower the water
level by about three meters enough to expose the edges of the lake bed,
though not its center. According to contemporary accounts, he obtained
between three and four thousand pesos of gold (a peso equals .146
ounces).
Many unknown Spaniards tried their luck with Guatavita, some of them
with success. The most serious of the recorded attempts was made by
Antonio de Sepulveda, a rich merchant of Santa Fe de Bogota. In the
1580s he began operations on a large scale. Using eight thousand Indian
workmen, he cut a great notch in the rim of the lake through which some
of the water ran out, lowering the level by twenty meters before the cut
collapsed, killing many of the laborers and causing the abandonment of
the scheme.
The best epitaph for Sepulveda (apart from his cut, which is still a
prominent feature of the landscape) comes from one of his old friends:
He said that, from the part of the lake margin that he managed to
uncover, he obtained more than 12,000 pesos.
Much later, the desire came over him to make another attempt at
drainage, but he could not, and in the end he died poor and tired. I
knew him well, and I helped to bury him in the church at Guatavita. Juan
Rodriguez Freyle, 1636
In 1801, Alexander von Humboldt, the foremost natural scientist of his
day, spent two months in Bogota, during which he visited Guatavita,
where he commented on Sepulveda's cut and measured the heights of the
mountains overlooking the lake.
Back home in Paris after his travels, Humboldt tried to calculate how
much gold the lake might contain. Estimating that one thousand pilgrims
might have visited Guatavita each year, over a period of one hundred
years, and that each visitor threw in five objects, he arrived at the
figure of about five hundred thousand offerings, worth (in 1807) some
thirty million dollars.
From that century to this one, men have invented schemes to drain Lake
Guatavita and uncover its riches. Although the central zone of the lake
remains untouched, many of these teams had partial success and picked up
a few more gold items to add to the spoils, until in 1965 the Colombian
government brought Guatavita under legal protection as part of the
nation's historical and cultural heritage.
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