El Dorado began as a real ritual before it became a legend: a Muisca king coated in gold dust, rowed out onto a mountain lake to make offerings the Spanish later turned into a myth of endless treasure. Archaeologist Jago Cooper traces that story through Colombia, from Bogota's high plateau to the Caribbean coast, moving through territory once held by two distinct cultures, the Muisca and the Tairona, both flourishing for centuries before the conquest arrived in the sixteenth century. He climbs into the mountains to reach a lost city built by Tairona engineers, and meets descendants who still hold the beliefs their ancestors did before Spanish contact. Gold recurs throughout, not as currency but as a material used to speak to gods, and Cooper spends real time with archaeologists and indigenous communities working through what that distinction actually meant. The film treats the Spanish legend as the least interesting part of the story and the Muisca and Tairona themselves as the reason to keep watching.