September 10, 2026
Lake Guatavita is a round lake of dark green water set in a bowl of forest at about 3,000 meters, an hour and a half northeast of Bogotá, and it is the place the legend of El Dorado comes from. The chroniclers wrote that the Muisca crowned a new chief here by covering him in gold dust and floating him to the middle of the lake on a raft, where he and his people threw gold and emeralds into the water. No Spaniard ever saw it happen, four centuries of treasure hunters tried to empty the lake anyway, and what is left is a protected reserve where the only way in is a guided walk to the rim. We run a private day trip here from Bogotá and a combined day with the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá, so this is the practical guide: what the lake is and is not, what the legend actually says, what the reserve charges in 2026, how to get here, the town that moved to make way for a reservoir, and the day that works.
The short version
The lake sits inside the Reserva Forestal Protectora Laguna del Cacique Guatavita y Cuchilla de Peña Blanca, 113 hectares of Andean forest run by the CAR, the environmental authority for Cundinamarca, in the municipality of Sesquilé. It opens Tuesday to Sunday and on holidays from 9 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon and closes on the first working day of every week for maintenance, which means Mondays, or the Tuesday after a holiday Monday. In 2026 a foreign visitor pays 31,000 pesos and a Colombian 21,500, and the ticket includes the guided walk, which is the only activity allowed: about two hours on a trail with steps that climbs from roughly 2,970 to 3,100 meters, in a group with a park guide. The town of Guatavita, a short drive away, was built from scratch in the 1960s after the original was flooded by the Tominé reservoir. Our private day trip is seven hours from your hotel in Bogotá with the entrance, the walk, a traditional lunch and the village included, from 114 US dollars per person for two travelers.
What Lake Guatavita is, and is not
From the rim the lake is an almost perfect circle about 400 meters across, and its steep wooded walls make everyone call it a crater. It is not a volcano. A study published by the Colombian Geographical Society found no volcanic rock anywhere in the region, tested and rejected the idea of a meteorite, and settled on a quieter explanation: the ground collapsed as salt beds underneath it dissolved. The same study put the lake at 2,990 meters above sea level and about 17 meters deep at its deepest point. On the northern side of the rim there is a deep notch that looks natural and is not; it is the scar of the Spanish attempt to drain the lake in the 1580s, and we come back to it below.
What surrounds the water is a strip of high Andean forest and páramo vegetation that the CAR manages as a protected reserve together with the neighboring ridge of Peña Blanca. The reserve is guarded, in the CAR’s own words, by the Mhuysqa community, descendants of the people who held the ceremonies here, and local narrators lead the walks and tell their story. It is a sacred site before it is a viewpoint, which is why there are no boats, no swimming, no picnics and no drones, and why the whole visit happens in a group with a guide.
The legend, in the version the chroniclers wrote
The Spanish who reached the Bogotá plateau in the 1530s were looking for gold, and among the Muisca they heard about a chief so rich that he did not wear worked gold but covered his body in the powdered metal. The story, as the Museo del Oro in Bogotá summarizes it, is that when a new cacique of Guatavita took power he was stripped, coated in gold dust and taken out on a raft to the center of the lake, where he bathed and where he and his followers threw offerings of gold and emeralds into the water. That chief, the golden one, is the origin of El Dorado; it was a person before it became a city, and the city was an invention of everyone who went looking for it afterwards. The Museo del Oro is careful on one point: no conquistador or adventurer ever witnessed the ceremony. What survives is the chronicle, the objects and the lake.
The objects are the best evidence that something like it was real. In 1856 two brothers partly drained the nearby Laguna de Siecha and found a small gold raft with figures on it that matched the description; it was sold abroad and destroyed in a fire at the port of Bremen. In 1969 a farmer found a second raft in a clay pot inside a cave in the páramo above Pasca, south of Bogotá, and the Banco de la República bought it for the Museo del Oro, where it is the centerpiece of the collection: 19.5 centimeters long, cast by the lost-wax method, a large figure standing among smaller ones on a flat raft, made sometime between the seventh and the sixteenth century. The Museo del Oro’s page on it makes the point that matters for your trip: the raft was not found in Guatavita, and the lake itself has given up far less than the legend promised. If you want the full story, see the raft in Bogotá first; the two hours at the lake mean more when you have already stood in front of it.
Four centuries of trying to empty it
The treasure hunting started within a few years of the conquest. Hernán Pérez de Quesada, brother of the founder of Bogotá, had the water bailed down by about three meters and took a few thousand pesos of gold from the exposed shore. In 1562 the Crown signed an agreement with Antonio de Sepúlveda that gave him the right to drain the lake in exchange for the royal fifth; in the 1580s his men cut the notch you see in the northern rim, the water fell far enough to pull gold from the mud around the edge, more than 12,000 pesos from the shores alone by the accounts of the time, and then a landslide blocked the cut and the lake filled again. By 1625 he was dead and a group of miners from the Santa Ana mines near Mariquita obtained a new concession from the president of the Audiencia on the same terms, with six months to drain the lake and the obligation to pay the king’s share of whatever came out. After independence, José Ignacio París raised money from shareholders in 1821 and tried a tunnel under the rim; it partly collapsed, and men died in it. The last and most determined attempt came in the early twentieth century, when a British company, Contractors Limited, drove a tunnel some 400 meters long to drain the lake; the gold and emeralds it recovered were worth a few hundred pounds against the cost of the works, and the operation ran out of money and stopped with the First World War. Since then the water has come back, and the lake has been protected. The most recent find is the smallest: in 2006, while the CAR was building the trail that circles the lake, a workman turned up a ceramic pot with four gold pieces inside; the work was stopped, the national archaeology institute was called in, and the pieces are now heritage rather than treasure.
Tickets, hours and rules in 2026
The reserve opens Tuesday to Sunday and on public holidays from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. It closes on the first working day of each week for maintenance, which in practice means every Monday and, on long weekends, the Tuesday. The CAR publishes its tariffs on its parks site, and for 2026 they are: 31,000 pesos for a foreign adult, 21,500 for a Colombian from outside the municipality, 4,500 for residents of Sesquilé, and for visitors of 62 and over 15,000, 11,000 and 1,000 respectively. Children under five go free, as do certified guides, people with disabilities and members of indigenous communities. Groups of more than 25 pay 15,000 per person and student groups 7,000, but only from Tuesday to Friday; there are no reduced rates at weekends. Prices are exempt from VAT and the ticket includes the guided walk. Cars pay 9,500 pesos a day to enter and buses 24,000, though the city of Bogotá’s own visitor note, published in January 2026 from CAR information, says the park has no parking service and suggests leaving the car in a guarded lot in one of the nearby towns; if you drive, plan for that.
Payment is only at the ticket office. The CAR’s site says the office has card terminals; the Bogotá note says payment is cash only because there is no signal for them. Bring cash and treat a working terminal as a bonus. The rules are the ones you would expect at a sacred site and a few you might not: no pets of any kind, no food or drink on the trail, no single-use plastics anywhere in the CAR’s parks since 2021, no alcohol, no swimming, no boats, no drones (the CAR says the noise disturbs the wildlife and the bee colonies in the reserve), keep your ticket because staff can ask for it at any point, and stay with your group and your guide. The reserve also applies a carrying capacity under Colombia’s tourism law and will stop admitting visitors when it is full; the walks leave every 15 to 20 minutes and last about two hours, so arrive with time to spare.
The walk
There is one way to see the lake and it is on foot, in a group, with a guide from the CAR or a narrator from the Mhuysqa community. The trail climbs from the entrance at about 2,970 meters to the viewpoints on the rim at about 3,100, on a path with flights of steps, roughly 150 of them on the steep section, and the guides stop along the way to talk about the forest and its birds, the Muisca and the legend. Along the way you can step into a kusmuy, a sacred house of the kind where the Muisca worshipped, and then the path reaches the rim and the lake appears below you, very green and very still, with the notch in its wall. The whole circuit takes about two hours at the group’s pace. It is not a hard hike by mountain standards, but it is a real climb at altitude on your first days in Colombia: the CAR’s own rules advise anyone for whom the change in altitude is a health risk not to start the ascent, and the town hall of Guatavita describes the trail as steep and unsuitable for people with heart or respiratory conditions. Take it slowly, and if you have arrived in Bogotá within the last day or two, do the Salt Cathedral first and leave the lake for later in the week.
The town hall of Guatavita says the park has bilingual guides. On our trips your own guide walks with you and translates whatever the park guide says, which also means you can ask the questions the group does not.
Getting here from Bogotá
The lake is about 75 kilometers northeast of Bogotá by the Autopista Norte, past Tocancipá and Sesquilé, then up an access road into the hills. The CAR gives the trip as 90 minutes; from a hotel in Bogotá with ordinary traffic our itinerary allows two hours each way. Bogotá’s visitor note suggests public transport for those who do not want to park, and in practice that means a bus from Bogotá to Sesquilé or Guatavita and local transport for the last stretch up to the reserve, which turns a day trip into a long one. Because the walk is guided and the ticket is fixed, what a tour adds is the drive, the translation, the timing and the lunch, and that is exactly what ours includes.
Guatavita, the town that moved
The Guatavita on the map today is not the one the legend belongs to. The old town stood in the valley of the Tominé river, and on 15 September 1967 it disappeared under the waters of the Tominé reservoir, built to regulate the Bogotá river for the hydroelectric plant at the Salto del Tequendama, to stop the floods on the Sabana and to feed the Tibitó plant that supplies water to the capital. The reservoir is 18 kilometers long and 4 wide, 38 meters deep and holds 630 million cubic meters, by the town hall’s figures. The government had begun building a replacement on higher ground in November 1964, and the move started in August 1967: a planned town of white walls and clay roofs, laid out in a residential half of symmetrical houses and a civic half with the church, the plaza, shops and restaurants, with a small parish museum and a Muisca museum. It sits at 2,680 meters above the water, and on our day trip it is where lunch happens and where the afternoon goes: a walk through the plaza, the view over the reservoir, and time to wander before the drive back.
When to go
The lake is at 3,000 meters and the weather changes by the hour, so go prepared rather than waiting for a perfect forecast. The drier months in the Bogotá highlands are December to February and July to August; April, May, October and November bring the most rain, and a wet trail is slippery on the steps, though this year’s El Niño should make the October and November rains lighter than usual. The temperature in the village is around 14 degrees at its warmest and the rim is colder, and often windy; the sun at this altitude burns even through cloud. Weekends and holiday weekends are the busiest days and the ones when the carrying capacity matters; a weekday, Tuesday to Friday, is quieter, and the earlier you arrive, the sooner you are on a walk. The reserve is closed on Mondays, so if your only free day in Bogotá is a Monday, this is not the trip. The month-by-month picture for the whole country is in our guide to the best time to visit Colombia.
A day that works
The private day we run most often: your guide and driver collect you at your hotel in Bogotá in the morning and take the road north out of the city, about two hours with a stop at the Tominé reservoir on the way. At the reserve your guide has the tickets, you join the next walk, and the hour and a half on the trail is the heart of the day. Then the short drive to the town of Guatavita for a traditional lunch, an hour and a half to eat and walk the plaza, and two hours back to your hotel, seven hours door to door. If your date turns out to be a closure day, we contact you to move it or refund you. The tour requires a moderate level of fitness for the steps, and the minimum age is two.
Combine it with the Salt Cathedral
If you have a single free day in Bogotá and want both, our private day to the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá and Guatavita does the cathedral in the morning, an hour in Zipaquirá, and the lake in the afternoon, ten hours with both entrances, lunch and a private vehicle, from 217 US dollars per person for two travelers; the shared version costs from 143 with a minimum of two and no lunch. It is a full day and the walk comes at the end of it, so it suits people who are already used to the altitude. Everything about the cathedral, from the 2026 tickets to the train, is in our Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá guide.
What it costs, and what is included
The private Lake Guatavita day trip is from 114 US dollars per person for two travelers, with discounts for larger groups, and it includes a private English-speaking guide for the whole day, private pickup and drop-off at your hotel in Bogotá, the entrance to the reserve, the guided walk with the park guide, insurance and a traditional lunch in the village. It does not include drinks and food beyond the lunch, personal purchases or tips. You can cancel free of charge up to 12 hours before the start, and bookings need to be made at least 12 hours ahead. Going on your own, the ticket is 31,000 pesos for a foreign adult; the rest of the cost is the transport and the day.
What we do differently
The walk is the same for everyone, because the reserve runs it. What changes is everything around it. Your guide has already told you the legend and the history on the drive up, so the park guide’s talk lands, and translates whatever the group is told. The vehicle is yours, so the reservoir stop, the lunch and the village take as long as you want, and if the altitude is bothering someone we slow the day down rather than march. We also do not send you to a lake that is closed: if your date falls on a closure day we contact you to move it or refund it, before you have wasted a morning. Lunch is a proper Colombian meal in the village, not a box, and the trip pairs naturally with the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, which we cover on our Bogotá tours.
Questions travelers ask
Is Lake Guatavita a volcanic crater?
No. It looks like one, but the region has no volcanic rock; the accepted explanation is that the ground collapsed as underlying salt layers dissolved. The lake is about 400 meters across and up to 17 meters deep.
Was El Dorado real?
The ceremony of the gilded chief is described in the Spanish chronicles and matched by two gold rafts found in the region, one of them in the Museo del Oro in Bogotá; the golden city was invented afterwards by the people who went looking for it. No European ever saw the ceremony.
How much is the entrance in 2026?
31,000 pesos for a foreign adult and 21,500 for a Colombian, 15,000 and 11,000 for visitors of 62 and over, free under five, with the guided walk included. Cars pay 9,500 to enter.
Is the lake open on Mondays?
No. The reserve opens Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 9 to 4 and closes on the first working day of the week, so a holiday Monday moves the closure to Tuesday.
How hard is the hike?
About two hours in a guided group, climbing from roughly 2,970 to 3,100 meters, with some 150 steps on the steep section. Moderate for anyone used to walking; harder in your first day or two at altitude.
Can you swim in the lake, or take a boat out?
No. Swimming is banned for safety, and boats are not allowed because the lake is a sacred site for the Muisca community.
Do I need cash?
Yes. The CAR says the ticket office has card terminals and Bogotá’s visitor note says cash only because there is no signal; carry enough pesos for the tickets. On our trips the entrance is included.
Plan it with us
Every trip we run to Lake Guatavita is private, guided, and starts at your hotel in Bogotá, on its own or with the Salt Cathedral. Write to us on WhatsApp with your date, or start with our Bogotá tours page.
