Klaus Kinski stars in the title role of Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre, who leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River in South America in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

Using a minimalist approach to story and dialogue, the film creates a vision of madness and folly, counterpointed by the lush but unforgiving Amazonian jungle.

The cast and crew climbed mountains, cut through heavy vines to open routes to the various jungle locations, and rode treacherous river rapids on rafts built by local craftworkers.

On Christmas Day, 1560, several scores of Spanish conquistadors under Gonzalo Pizarro and a hundred native slaves march down from the newly conquered Inca Empire into the Amazon rainforest in search of the fabled El Dorado.

Aguirre leads a mutiny against Ursúa, telling the men that untold riches await them ahead, and reminding them that Hernán Cortés won an empire in Mexico by disobeying orders.

An indigenous couple approaching peacefully by canoe are captured by the explorers, and when the man expresses confusion upon being presented with a Bible, Brother Carvajal kills them for blasphemy.

In order to get the performance he desired, Herzog would deliberately infuriate Kinski before each shot and wait for the actor's anger to "burn itself out" before rolling the camera.

[11] On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where members of the cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three gunshots at it, blowing the tip off of one extra's finger.

The cast and crew climbed up mountains, experienced the adverse conditions of the jungle, and rode Amazonian river rapids on rafts built by locals.

[19] AllMusic noted, "The film's central motif blends pulsing Moog and spectral voices conjured from Florian Fricke's Mellotron-related 'choir organ' to achieve something sublime, in the truest sense of the word: it's hard not to find the music's awe-inspiring, overwhelming beauty simultaneously unsettling.

While Herzog was location scouting for Aguirre in Peru, his reservation on LANSA Flight 508 was canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary.

During this flight, the airplane disintegrated in mid-air after a lightning strike and crashed in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest in 1971, killing 91 people: all on board except 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke.

"[25] In Time, Richard Schickel opined that "[Herzog] does the audience the honor of allowing it to discover the blindnesses and obsessions, the sober lunacies he quietly lays out on the screen.

Well acted, most notably by Klaus Kinski in the title role, gloriously photographed by Thomas Mauch, Aguirre is, not to put too fine a point on it, a movie that makes a convincing claim to greatness.

The site's critics consensus reads, "A haunting journey of natural wonder and tangible danger, Aguirre transcends epic genre trappings and becomes mythological by its own right.

[42] J. Hoberman agreed, noting that Herzog's "sui generis Amazon fever dream" was "the influence Malick's over-inflated New World can't shake.

"[29] Channel 4 opined "This is an astonishing, deceptively simple, pocket-sized epic whose influence, in terms of both style and narrative, is seen in films as diverse as Apocalypse Now, The Mission, Predator, and The Blair Witch Project (1999).

"[46] Although plot details and many of the characters in Aguirre come directly from Herzog's own imagination, historians have pointed out that the film fairly accurately incorporates some 16th-century events and historical personages into a fictional narrative.

Herzog's screenplay merged two expeditions: one led by Gonzalo Pizarro in 1541, which resulted in the discovery by Europeans of the Amazon River by Francisco de Orellana, and another one that occurred in 1560.

After failing to find the legendary city, Orellana was unable to return because of the current, and he and his men continued to follow the Napo River until he reached the estuary of the Amazon in 1542.

His general attitude towards the local people was consistent with the benevolence of his better-known brother Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas.

[citation needed] This personality is at odds with the description in the film where Carvajal is portrayed as a cowardly priest who claimed that "the church was always on the side of the strong".

[8] The film's major characters, Aguirre, Ursúa, Don Fernando, Inez and Flores, were involved in the second expedition, which left Peru in 1560 to find the city of El Dorado.

[47] Fernando himself was eventually murdered when he questioned Aguirre's scheme of sailing to the Atlantic, conquering Panama, crossing the isthmus and invading Peru.

The conversation in which the local inhabitants refuse a Bible comes from events before the Battle of Cajamarca, in which Inca emperor Atahualpa allegedly rejected the Requerimiento (declaration by the Spanish monarchy in 1513 of its divine right to take New World territories).

The chronicle of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación ("The Account"), mentions the appearance of a boat in a treetop after a fierce tropical storm in Hispaniola: Monday morning we went down to the port and did not find the ships.

Aguirre's frequent short but impassioned speeches to his men in the film were accurately based on the man's noted "simple but effective rhetorical ability".

[47] The South Atlantic Review observes the film's attitude toward historical accuracy as being similar to works of Shakespeare:Like Shakespeare, Herzog begins with chronicle accounts of events and personages, but then re-shapes and embroiders upon these historical chronicles, at once providing answers and revealing more puzzling questions, not only turning "history" into "art" (a tenuous distinction in any case), but meditating upon the makers and the making of history.

— Gregory A. Waller[47]Additionally noted is the juxtaposition of Spanish imperialism with that of Nazism, specifically citing Aguirre's deranged closing speech as "historical analogy with Hitler and German fascism".

It is not surprising then, that Herzog's film constitutes a great flight of fancy mostly leaving historical data behind and making instead a collage of fact and fiction.