D is for Dorado

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.)

        El Dorado, City of Gold, next best thing to the Midas Touch as a symbol of limitless greed… Where did the legend come from?  What fragments of truth may have led to the fantasy?  To find out, read 

the post about El Dorado.

        As for depictions of the city, the legend isn’t old enough to have any older illustrations, and the treasure hunters themselves were far too busy digging and slaughtering to moon about, painting enticing pictures.  Only when the idea of El Dorado became firmly relegated to modern fantasy have modern fantasy artists started to put their imaginations to work on visual representations of a fantastical golden city.  So here are two pieces of digital art with two different takes on the idea.  First is a more traditional Central-American-inspired version.  It includes a faint overlay of the Aztec sun disk, with Mayan-style architecture.  As befits a lost city, it is overgrown, and the path to it is broken and uneven.  

The second depiction is interesting for evoking a futuristic city instead, all sharp-angled skyscrapers lighting up the night.  I like the thought of El Dorado existing for all this time, never discovered and despoiled by conquistadors, entering the twenty-first -- or thirty-first -- century in all its splendor.

        The MORAL of El Dorado: The belief that money is the most precious thing destroys all the most precious things.

              OR:  Gold is really not the best construction material.

        So, how do you picture El Dorado?  Or if you had all that gold, perhaps you’d use it for something other than paving the streets and blinging out the architecture?

[Pictures: El Dorado - The Lost City of Gold, digital art by Brian Giberson (Image from Indigo Light);

El Dorado, digital art by Gonzalo Golpe (Image from GolpeArt).]