ELDORADO (Span. the Golden Region), the name given by Orellana, the lieutenant of Pizarro, to a region which he pretended to have discovered in South America, and which he thus named on account of the immense treasures of gold and precious stones he asserted that he had seen at Manoa, the capital of the country. From this fiction, the word Eldorado has become a proverbial term for a region of boundless wealth and felicity, like the Elysium of the ancients, or the paradise of Mohammed.