In Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, El Dorado is revealed to be a golden idol rather than a city.
Nathan Drake begins the adventure following clues connected to Sir Francis Drake and the legendary South American land of gold. The name “El Dorado” suggests a lost city, but the game’s discovery changes that assumption: the treasure is a large golden statue that the Spanish attempted to remove from its original location.
The idol is not merely valuable. It contains the remains of a mummy infected with a mutagenic pathogen. People who encounter it can become the savage, zombie-like creatures known as the Descendants. That hidden danger explains why earlier Spanish and German expeditions vanished and why the supposed treasure has such a destructive history.
The answer is sometimes shortened to “statue,” which is conceptually right, but “golden idol” is the clearest canonical phrasing. It is also easy to confuse this fictional discovery with the historical El Dorado legend, which referred to a ruler or a fabled region of wealth, not a confirmed city.