Colombian Tumbaga

Tumbaga is the name given by Spanish conquistadors to the gold-copper alloy used by Colombia's pre-Columbian peoples, including the Muisca, Zenú, Quimbaya, and Tairona cultures, to create objects of astonishing beauty and spiritual power. Unlike the pure gold preferred in Europe and Asia, Andean and Colombian smiths discovered that alloying gold with copper produced a metal with superior working properties — more malleable, able to hold finer detail, and capable of being surface-treated to achieve the appearance of pure gold through a process called depletion gilding.

The quantity and quality of gold objects produced by Colombia's pre-Columbian cultures was extraordinary enough to generate the El Dorado legend — the myth of a city or king of gold that drove Spanish conquistadors to suicidal expeditions through jungle and mountain. The Muisca ritual of El Dorado ('the golden one') involved the new chief of the Guatavita Lake region being covered in gold dust and then diving into the sacred lake while attendants threw golden offerings after him — a ceremony of such spectacular wealth that the Spanish could barely believe accounts of it.

The Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) in Bogotá, Colombia, holds over 55,000 pre-Columbian gold and tumbaga objects, the largest collection of pre-Columbian goldwork in the world. Today, tumbaga-inspired jewelry and gold charms from Colombia are prized both for their material quality and for their connection to this extraordinary civilizational legacy.