The City Of Gold-CIBOLA

This just offer another insight of what could have it really meant by the city of gold. Sure for most of us it is like, the city is or were literally built with gold. Thay must have used tonnes of gold to built a CITY.

Alternatively thinking, or you could just widen your perpective that the city was built by the income(money) generate from gold mining in the region. Like some of interior villages--they were investing on pepper(white pepper), put into consideration that this village have no 24hours electricity, treated water, proper land transportation(road) and far from civilisation-that says, the source of income would come from the pepper sales.

Back to cibola, it might also be a way of the people in the old days to attract people to come to that region so there would be trade happening. More or maybe people would be migrating to that particular area in search of maybe gold. If it is not there's a believe of existance of city of gold, there would be no expedition to search for the so called city of gold and no offshore settlement be built in the new found land.

This is how the cibola (city of gold) would look like

Another thing might be well put into consideration is that the settlement than can serve as stop over or pit stop for trader that had trade far into the other part of the trading route.