Raleigh's Quest 

For a brief period during its tumultuous history, El Dorado actually had a home deep in the jungles of Guyana. 

English courtier and Elizabethan heartthrob, Sir Walter Raleigh, undertook two voyages to the last country in our beloved adventure in search of the mythical city. In 1595 he even went as far as mapping El Dorado near Lake Parime, along the Orinoco River in Guyana. This remained in British and European maps until its existence was disproved by Alexander von Humboldt during his Latin American expedition in 1799–1804. A minor point, which we do not need to dwell on right now.

Yet, before von Humboldt came and ruined it for everybody, Raleigh had embarked on a number of expeditions. The exaggerated and grandiose accounts of these journeys only went to further fuel and magnify the myth and became one of Raleigh’s obsessions. However, he obviously was not aware of the fate of most of the previous explorers and did not catch the hint when he was imprisoned upon his return at the Tower of London by the new king, James I. Nonetheless, by this time the legend had become so prominent that he was released and ordered to lead a second expedition. In 1617 he sent his son, Watt, on a voyage up the Orinoco River. Raleigh senior, now an old man and tired of flirting in the royal courts, waited eagerly at his base camp in Trinidad. The expedition was inevitably a disaster and Watt Raleigh was killed whilst ransacking a Spanish outpost. Walter Raleigh was furious at the sole survivor; who informed him of Watt's death, and accused him of letting his son die. Having spent enough time with Queen Elizabeth and her Machiavellian ways, Raleigh must have been such an expert guilt-tripper that he actually drove the man to suicide.

However, the (by now) typical fate of every El Dorado explorer did not escape Sir Walter Raleigh either who, upon his return to England, was beheaded at the orders of the king to appease the ever-influential Spaniards.