A tiny gold raft carries a chief covered in gold, on his way to offer tributes to the gods in a lagoon. The Museo del Oro keeps it, and many scholars read it as a picture of the ritual behind El Dorado.

The Spaniards heard the story and made it grander: first a golden man, then a golden city. They arrived in their thousands to look for it. The city never turned up. But the museum, holds what Colombia’s indigenous peoples really made from the metal, including a gold vase called the poporo quimbaya.

On VoiceMap, the Colonial Bogotá tour ends at the museum’s door, with the raft and the poporo singled out as the two pieces to look for. The Traditional Bogotá tour points the museum out from the Iglesia de San Francisco.