James Stewart

The link is in the description if you want your digital life a bit more private as we head back to El Dorado.

Yeah, we touched on this place right at the start of the video and it turns out the reason we cannot see it is because it never existed.

Yeah, sadly for all of those would-be treasure hunters, the gold one was actually not a place, but a person.

The name comes from the Muisca people, who lived high in the Andes of modern day Colombia from AD 500 and still do to this day actually.

To the Muisca, gold wasn't a symbol of wealth or private treasure.

It had a deeper meaning, it was sacred.

During rite of passage ceremonies, a new ruler, known by the Spanish as El Dorado or the Golden One, would undergo a dramatic ritual.

His body would be covered head to toe in gold dust, and he would set out on a raft into the centre of a sacred lake, most famously Lake Guatavita, 75km northeast of what is now the capital, Bogota.

Once in the center, priests and attendants would cast gold and precious other things into the lake as offerings.

Then covered in gold, the ruler might submerge himself into the water and return to shore with the remaining dust washed off his skin and remaining in the water.

When Spanish chroniclers like Juan Rodriguez Frele in the 16th century shared these second-hand stories, over many centuries, stories of immense gold offerings and dazzling ceremonies became more than just decorated leaders.

They turned into a whole city full of treasure that Europeans just sort of reimagined.

Soon the idea had taken on a life of its own, and just as cartographers redrew maps to include lost cities like Atlantis, the name El Dorado also started to appear.

Fortunately though, science eventually intervened, and remarkably a gold raft depicting the exact scene we've just described

was found in 1969 by three villagers.

It was hidden away in a small cave in the hills, showing the man covered in gold going out into a sacred lake, the real story of El Dorado.

So yeah, in the end scientists weren't able to uncover a city of gold, but they did find something arguably way more valuable.

Now we go deeper, literally, because one of the Amazon's strangest secrets isn't in a wall or a road, but instead is its soil.

Bear with me here.

I know that doesn't sound as exciting, but trust me, it is.