The Glittering Gold Museum in Bogota

The Gold Museum in Bogota is one of Columbia’s most important museums with an extraordinary collection of Pre Hispanic gold work on display. The museum has more than 34,000 pieces of gold, belonging to the indigenous cultures who lived more than 500 years ago, during the Inca Empire and long before it. The pieces on display represents the largest collection of pre-Columbian South American gold work in the world, and together with pottery, woodwork, textile and other archeological objects, they tell the stories of more than a dozen indigenous societies which inhabited what is now known as Colombia before contact was made with Europe. The indigenous people of South America were rich in gold and silver. These people had­ been mining the Andes and working with the precious metal for thousands of years, creating finely crafted treasure and jewelry. Their use of gold was religious and ceremonial, as a beautiful offering to the gods or a sign of status and power. An exhibit at the Gold Museum in Bogota. This gold mask was made between 200 BC to 900 AD. Photo credit When the Spanish came, they quickly stripped the Inca Empire of thousands of pounds of gold and silver. What little survived were hidden away in secret tombs and sacred sites, and now are at display at the Gold Museum. The museum was founded in 1939 with its first major acquisition, a container from the Quimbaya people called the Poporo Quimbaya . The vessel’s smooth gold surface and symmetrical crown is strikingly modern, even though it was crafted between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago. The museum’s most precious collection is the Muisca Raft discovered in 1886 in a Colombian cave. The piece is about 10 inches long and depicts a chieftain standing on a flat raft and surrounded by priests and oarsmen, in what appears to be a ceremony of the legend of El Dorado, a mythical city of unimaginable richness, that seduced the Spanish colonizers. The item weighs 287 grams of which 80% is gold.