El Dorado

“Over the Mountains | Of the Moon | Down the Valley of the Shadow | Ride, boldly ride | The shade replied | If you seek for Eldorado.” Edgar Allen Poe’s ghostly verse from 1849 encapsulates the myth of the lost city of gold, El Dorado, which tantalised Spanish and English colonialists in South America ever since their arrival in the 1500s. Hidden in the mists of the Peruvian Andes was the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, shown here with its stone buildings and terraces of golden turf. The Spanish found no gold at Machu Picchu; in fact they never found Machu Picchu at all.