In 1525, at the foot of the great outlying mass of mountains on the peninsula that lies between the Gulfs of Maracaibo and Darien, and not far from where the Magdalena River empties into the Caribbean Sea, the town of Santa Marta had been founded—the first Spanish settlement in Colombia beyond the Isthmus. It was nothing more than a slave station for a time, from whence kidnaping parties made raids into the country round about and captured natives to sell to the gold miners in Española. Real attempts at colonization were not begun until Pedro de Heredia founded Cartagena, farther west, in 1533; but it was from these points that the explorations were undertaken that led to the discovery of the next great stores of gold and also to fresh, and this time seemingly trustworthy, affirmations of the truth of the story told by the Indians of the Isthmus, of the king the Spaniards called _El Dorado_ (the Gilded Man), in whose country the rivers were said to run over sands of silver, where the palaces were of gold, with doors and columns studded with precious stones and the king bathed in aromatic essences and covered his body with gold dust. [Illustration: PIZARRO’S PALACE, LIMA—NOW THE GOVERNMENT BUILDING. IT WAS HERE THAT THE GREAT CONQUISTADOR WAS ASSASSINATED.] Heredia had found that the hills south of Cartagena contained profitable gold washings and had learned from the Indians of a region called Zenufana back in the mountains of the interior where the deposits were more valuable still, and this story, having proven true, had brought about the conquest of the rich valley of the Cauca and the development of mines that have yielded hundreds of millions in gold. The shares, even of Heredia’s men in the first outcroppings, are declared by the chroniclers to have been greater than those of the followers of Pizarro in the ransom of the Inca. And, at about the same time, Pizarro’s enterprising lieutenant, Sebastian de Benalcázar, the conqueror of Quito, had continued north and fought his way through the warlike, semi-civilized tribes that inhabited the high plateaux around Pasto to the lower country now known as Popayan, where the Cauca gathers its headwaters, and, in rapid succession, had overcome the tribes that opposed his progress until he had met the expedition from Cartagena, after which he had gone back to Peru.