May 29, 2026
First full day in bogota.
Im coming to the realization on the trip that I do vastly more things when I’m in significantly lower populated places. I don’t know. The kind of things that seem to interest city tourists really hold little appeal to me.
What have I done to pass the time today?
I walked about old town Bogota, as much as possible, anyway. Colombia’s presidential election is this coming Sunday, and they’re expecting drama, so protestor corrals and crowd barricades are being put up preemptively.
Went to the museo del oro, in English the museum of gold. It would be more accurately called the museum of pre columbian metallurgy, since it involved more than gold. But it was interesting.
That’s just one example out of three floors of exhibition rooms filled with precious metals.
Which brings up a history lesson regarding Bogota.
When the Spanish first started pushing inland in South America, in what is now Venezuela, the kept encountering natives who had gold, but didn’t mine gold. When pressed about where they got it they would say “from the next village”. Several villages later, the response changed to “we get it from the people we get salt from”
So the Spanish started searching for people who mined salt. And in that search they started hearing stories of a king who would every day cover himself in gold dust and then wash it off in a sacred lake. That story eventually got turned into a king with a city of gold, which became known as El Dorado.
Eventually the Spanish found the source of the salt. Here. And established the city of Bogota as a base to continue searching for El Dorado. But there was no city of gold. And although there is gold in the Colombian Andes, the natives here didn’t mine it. They got it in trade from Peru via Ecuador. So really the closest thing to a city of gold was Cusco, but at that point in history the Spanish didn’t know the geography of South America yet.
The Spanish begrudgingly accepted that there was no actual city of gold once they started filling in the map. But Sir Walter Raleigh convinced himself it did exist and was just in Argentina, and led several expeditions down there looking for it.
But, anyway. Bogota was the source of the salt associated with el dorado. And the people here definitely had gold and were pretty skilled with making things out of it.
Also took the teleférico up to monserrate to get a view of the city.
Other than that I’ve pretty much just been aimlessly walking around.
Tomorrow I may or may not try to transit myself to one of those salt mines in a little town about an hour north of here, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m off to find dinner.
-Jennifer
PS, if you ever wanna buy Big Ass Ants, now you know, there’s a lady selling them on the street in Bogota
