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Additional gold and silver strikes

It appears today that the Muisca obtained their gold in trade, and while they possessed large quantities of it over time, no great store of the metal was ever accumulated.

In the second half of the 16th century, the Spanish silver strike at Potosí in Upper Peru (modern Bolivia) was producing an estimated 60 percent of the world's silver.

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I of England died, bringing to an end the era of Elizabethan adventurism. In 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh, the great inspirer, was beheaded after returning from an expedition to Venezuela in search of El Dorado for an attack on a Spanish outpost.

In 1695, bandeirantes in the south struck gold along a tributary of the São Francisco River in the highlands of State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The prospect of real gold overshadowed the illusory promise of "gold men" and "lost cities" in the vast interior of the north.

The gold mine at El Callao (Venezuela), started in 1871, a few miles at south of Orinoco River, was for a time one of the richest in the world, and the goldfields as a whole saw over a million ounces exported between 1860 and 1883. The immigrants who emigrated to the gold mines of Venezuela were mostly from the British Isles and the British West Indies.

The Orinoco Mining Arc (OMA), officially created on February 24, 2016 as the Arco Mining Orinoco National Strategic Development Zone, is an area rich in mineral resources that the Republic of Venezuela has been operating since 2017; occupies mostly the north of the Bolivar state and to a lesser extent the northeast of the Amazonas state and part of the Delta Amacuro state. It has 7,000 tons of reserves of gold, copper, diamond, coltan, iron, bauxite and other minerals.

A photograph taken from the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021 showed golden areas near the Amazon River. These were determined to be extensive illegal gold mining operations. Such photography and, especially, satellite surveys, have revealed the extent of the impact of these operations. They suggest the rate of forest loss more than tripled as gold prices rose in 2008, largely driven by small, illegal mining operations that now account for most activity in the region. A team from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, has estimated, using satellite data and field surveys together, that mining covered fewer than 10,000 hectares in 1999 but had spread beyond 50,000 hectares by September 2012.