The Road to El Dorado/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Artistic License History: Let's be serious. Excluding the presence of fairies and talking worms, this resembles Cortez's campaign as much as The Magic Voyage resembles Columbus' first travel. Though, of course, that's not the point.
  • Did Not Do the Research: The film depicts Hernan Cortez as searching for El Dorado somewhere in Central America, yet the Legend starts way after the subduing of Mesoamerica, and in a very different place: The Lake of Guatavita, in modern Cundinamarca, Colombia, homeland of the Muisca people, specifically the Bacata confederacy. Here the coronation ceremony of the ruler (called Zipa) was held, in which he would reach the centre of the lake accompanied by the High Priest, jump into the lake while completely covered in gold dust, while the spectators threw their most valuable goldcraft into the lake as an religious offering. Witnessed by the Spaniards, this ceremony sprawled the legend. Note that the Muiscas were a people (and nation) different from the Aztecs and Incas, both geographically and culturally.
    • Also many expeditions were taken across all of northern South America, one of them even discovering the Amazon river. Not too close to Mayan pyramids, huh?
    • Notably, the currency of the peseta is mentioned throughout the movie, but it wasn't introduced until about 350 years later.
    • Cortez is portrayed as some kind of powerful/feared figure sailing from Spain to conquer the New World "for gold", in pure conquistador-as-told-in-the-Public-School fashion. But in reality he was fairly obscure when he sailed from Cuba, where he had been living for a decade, under orders of Governor Diego Velazquez to set a trading post off the coast of Mexico. He only discovered the mainland was rich in gold and decided to go for a conquest campaign when he was already there, and the rest is History. Not to mention he actually had to defeat a Spanish counter-expedition sent by the less than pleased Velazquez to stop him before having his hands free to topple the Aztecs (who don't even appear in the movie).
      • Additionally, he is portrayed as a massively tall, muscular, menacing and intimidating figure...when in Real Life he was actually of average height, fairly unattractive, and (thanks to a childhood injury and having suffered syphilis) slightly deformed and hunchbacked. Of course, a lionized portrayal of him is hardly a new event, and in this case the upgrade was clearly to present a more dangerous and ominous villain.
    • Prime example of a Mayincatec medley: the High Priest appears to worship Quetzalcoatl and wants to sacrifice human lives (very Aztec), but Xibalba and the dual gods creating the world in the beginning (presumably Tepeu and Gucumatz) are directly from the Popol Vuh - a Mayan text.
      • Quetzalcoatl was the one Aztec god to whom human sacrifices were not given.
  • Easter Egg: When Tzekel-Kan is flicking through his codex, one of the pictures is a boy fishing from a moon.
  • Hey, It's That Voice!:
  • What Could Have Been: If this film had made its money back, we could have a whole franchise of them by now. They deliberately sprinkled the film with sequel hooks, and were already in the early stages of plotting our the sequels. One alternative ending to the film actually had them In Medias Res in their next adventure.
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