Between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, the altiplano (high plain) around what is present-day Bogota was the home of a decentralized and linguistically diverse group of people we now collectively call the Muisca. Muisca caciques (rulers) presided over a wide variety of valuable materials—including textiles, metals, precious stones, tobacco, coca, and beeswax—and officiated at collective offering rituals.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia encompasses a unique ecosystem as the world’s tallest coastal mountain range. During earlier periods (Nahuange), people concentrated in the coastal bays, where they fished, farmed, extracted salt, and produced tumbaga (gold-copper alloy) adornments and figures. From 900 CE, in the Tairona period, these groups settled higher on the rugged mountain slopes, constructing large urban centers (see photos below), water systems, and stone pathways.

The cold, high mountains on the present-day border between Colombia and Ecuador were inhabited by groups of farmers, herders, and hunters from the fifth century CE. They took advantage of the variety of different climates at different altitudes to grow a multitude of products, in addition trading with Pacific coastal and Amazonian communities for shells, gold, feathers, and more. 
  

"The Caribbean lowlands are an area of marshes, estuaries and grasslands susceptible to seasonal flooding. Between around 200 BCE and 1000 CE, the Zenúes successfully lived here by constructing half a million hectares (almost two thousand square miles) of ditch-and-raised-field systems, which are still visible today (see photo).
  

"In the Calima region in the Western Cordillera, traces of dwellings, cemeteries, roads, and fields with raised ridges and drainage canals testify to a continuous occupation from 1500 BCE through the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, changes in the archeology of the region, as well as its ceramic and metalworking styles, allows us to distinguish three distinct periods. 
  

The Histoire Naturelle des Indes is an early exercise in economic geography, charting resource use and profits in the New World. Colorful illustrations of plants, animals, and people engaged in various activities are accompanied by captions in French. The author paid careful attention to the workings of the Spanish colonial administration, particularly the mining, minting, and transportation of silver and gold. This passage reads as follows:
  

Around 1555, Spanish artist Alonso de Narváez was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rosary, accompanied by Saint Anthony and Saint Andrew, for a small chapel. The scene, which was painted on a canvas made of native cotton (a precious material), deteriorated to a point where it was no longer visible. 
  

This engraving, titled “How the Emperor of Guaiana Tends to Prepare His Noblemen When He Has Them as Guests,” depicts part of a ceremony in which a cacique (ruler) is covered in a layer of gold dust. The passage reads:
 

Legends about a city of gold located in northern South America date to the sixteenth century. However, in some of the earliest stories, “El Dorado” refers not to a place but to a person: “the gilded one.” While a golden city remains a fantasy, there is real evidence for ceremonies involving a gilded man. A 1599 engraving in this case, for example, illustrates a ceremony in which a cacique (ruler) is covered in gold dust. 
  

Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita was born and raised in Santa Fe de Bogotá, and his Historia General is an all-encompassing narrative of the Spanish invasion of the region that came to be known as the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama). The engraved medallions decorating the title page show fictitious portraits of Muisca leaders, copied from representations of the Inca in Peru, as well as imagined battle scenes of their conquest.