🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555 ACTIVE

Chullachaqui

Chullachaqui is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Loreto y San Martín, PE. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Chullachaqui sighted?

Location: Loreto y San Martín, PE
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: -3.744, -73.252
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is Chullachaqui?

The Chullachaqui is a shape-shifting forest being of the Peruvian Amazon, told above all in San Martín and Loreto. Its name is Quechua: González Holguín's 1608 vocabulary glosses chaqui as "pie o la pierna" and chhulla as a thing "sin compañera entre cosas pareadas", a "cossa desigual que no viene con otra" — the same dictionary that records chulla ñaui for the one-eyed and chhulla maqui for the one-handed. The being borrows any shape it likes, a friend, a relative, a bird, a piglet, a tree, a stream, and leads whoever follows it deep into the forest; only its mismatched feet give it away. Which foot, though, is not settled: Francisco Izquierdo Ríos printed the defect in the right foot in 1939 and in the left in 1952 and 1975, and it is his last version that everyone now repeats. The Chullachaqui is also a set of trees — chullachaqui caspi, blanco and colorado — used in Amazonian plant medicine. It has never been proposed as an undiscovered animal by anyone; it entered the cryptid catalogues through a Wikipedia infobox edited in March 2018.

Chullachaqui — illustration — A carved Chullachaqui photographed on 18 March 2018 in the grounds of Los Paucares Inn, a hotel in Iquitos. It is decorative statuary made for visitors, not a traditional representation: no such image belongs to the oral tradition this entry documents, which describes the being by its footprints rather than its face. The same Wikipedia editor who took this photograph added, three days later, the infobox that first classified the Chullachaqui as a cryptid. Image: LLs · CC BY-SA 4.0

What is the history of Chullachaqui?

The Chullachaqui is a forest being of the Peruvian Amazon, told above all in San Martín and Loreto. It is not a hidden animal and it has never been proposed as one. It is a shape-shifter, and what the tales are really about is a recognition test: whatever it borrows — a friend, a relative, a bird, a pig, a tree, a stream — its feet give it away, because they do not match. The name is Quechua and, unusually for this catalogue, the etymology can be checked in a primary source rather than repeated. In Diego González Holguín's Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú llamada lengua Qquichua o del Inca (Lima, 1608) the two pieces are there, separately. "Chaqui" is glossed "Pie o la pierna". "Chhulla" gets two entries: "Vna cosa sin compañera entre cosas pareadas" — a thing with no partner among paired things — and "Candelero, vinagera cossa desigual que no viene con otra o no corresponde en tamaño, o en proporcion", which is, word for word, the Chullachaqui's defect. A third entry, "Chulla chulla, o chacu chacu", is glossed simply "Lo desigual". The 1608 vocabulary also shows that this is a productive pattern, not a one-off: "Chulla ñaui. El de vn ojo no mas, o el tuerto", "Chhulla rinri. El de vna oreja", "Chhulla maqui. El manco de vna mano", "Chhulla çapato. El vn çapato de dos". Chulla + body part = the one who has an odd one. What is NOT in the 1608 vocabulary is the compound itself: a search of the full digitised text returns zero hits for "chulla chaqui" while returning the four control entries above and "Chaqui. Pie o la pierna". The morphemes and the pattern are colonial Cuzco Quechua; the lexicalised creature-name is not recorded there. That matters because Loreto and San Martín are not Cuzco-Quechua country: the local varieties are lowland Quechua (Lamas, Napo). Nécker Salazar Mejía, of the Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal, addresses the point directly in his 2019 study of the Arguedas–Izquierdo Ríos compilation: several Amazonian place and creature names are Quechua because of historical contact between Andean and Amazonian peoples. He glosses the name exactly as our file did — "del quechua «chulla», 'desigual', y «chaki», 'pie'" — so the gloss is not ours and not invented; it is a named scholar's, and it is consistent with 1608. The tales themselves have an author trail, and it flips. Francisco Izquierdo Ríos, born in Saposoa (San Martín), printed the Chullachaqui at least three times, and his own successive versions contradict each other on the single detail everyone repeats. In Ande y Selva (Lima, 1939), tale 32, he closes: "cuando el chullachaqui se transforma en gente siempre tiene una imperfección: la de su pie derecho, que es mucho más pequeño que el izquierdo" — the RIGHT foot is the small one. In the novel En la tierra de los árboles (1952) it has moved: "su pie izquierdo es chiquito, como de criatura recién nacida, como un bola de cerdas o bien como pata de jaguar". And in Pueblo y bosque. Folklore amazónico (1975), the version everybody now quotes, it is fixed: "el izquierdo puede ser chiquito como pie de criatura recién nacida, como bola de caucho o cerdoza, como pata de tigre o como una raíz de árbol, mientras el derecho es de tamaño normal". Nobody falsified anything. The author simply reprinted himself, and the last printing won. Everything downstream — including the earlier version of this file — inherited the 1975 foot without knowing there had been another. The 1939 text is also where the named informants are, and they are the people that later retellings delete: an aunt, "Una viejecita eximia relatadora de cuentos de Selva"; a grandfather, Nico, to whom it appeared in the plot disguised as his compadre and who advised threatening it with a machete and speaking loudly, and who added that when it vanishes it leaves "un denso olor a chivo"; and a don Pascual, who distinguished it from the Christian devil and said it appears in "sitios pesados" and speaks "siempre palabras incomprensibles i gangosas". The widest Peruvian printing is Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos, the compilation José María Arguedas and Izquierdo Ríos assembled from texts sent in by rural schoolteachers and published in 1947. It carries four Chullachaqui narratives, and — this is the part that our file had erased — each one is credited to the teacher who collected it: "El cazador y el Chullachaqui" (San Martín), collected by the preceptor Teófilo Peña; "El Chullachaqui" (San Martín), collected by the preceptora Angélica Reá; a second "El Chullachaqui" from Loreto; and "Los chanchitos", also from Loreto. In the hunter's tale the tracks read "la derecha, de pie humano; y la izquierda, de pata de tigre". In the San Martín tale a young woman fishing on the Cumbaza stream is invited onward by "un caballero cojo, pero bien vestido" and held in a cave for eight days. In the Loreto tale two brothers go out shooting and one of them is joined by a double of the other, whom he unmasks because "los pies de su acompañante eran desiguales: el pie izquierdo más pequeño y con uñas a manera de garras de tigre". And there is a whole second Chullachaqui that had fallen out of this file entirely: it is also a set of trees. In the Amazonian Ethnobotanical Dictionary of James A. Duke and Rodolfo Vásquez (1994), page 230, "Chullachaqui caspi" is Remijia peruviana Standl. (Rubiaceae) — "Iquitos children drink it during the new moon to become strong" — while "Chullachaqui blanco" is Pourouma ovata Trecul and "Chullachaqui colorado" a Tovomita sp. In the vegetalismo of the Iquitos region these are plantas maestras: Robert Tindall's The Jaguar that Roams the Mind (2008) calls chullachaqui caspi "a curative and teacher plant", and the ethnobotanical collection Plants, Health and Healing (2010) records a palero who had "studied" the medicine of the female Chullachaki caspi tree. Whatever else the Chullachaqui is, in Iquitos it is something you can be prescribed.

Timeline: the documented record of Chullachaqui

1608 Diego González Holguín's Quechua vocabulary is printed in Lima. It glosses "Chaqui" as "Pie o la pierna" and "Chhulla" as "Vna cosa sin compañera entre cosas pareadas" and as a "cossa desigual que no viene con otra o no corresponde en tamaño, o en proporcion", and records the productive pattern chulla ñaui (one-eyed), chhulla rinri (one-eared), chhulla maqui (one-handed), chhulla çapato (one shoe of two). The compound chulla chaqui is not among its entries: zero hits in the full digitised text, against those four controls.
1930 Paul C. Standley describes Remijia peruviana as a new species in Studies of American Plants (Field Museum of Natural History, Botany 8: 156), listing the vernacular names "cascarilla" and "collar lisa". "Chullachaqui" does not appear in the volume.
1936 Llewelyn Williams's Woods of Northeastern Peru catalogues Amazonian timbers with their Iquitos-region vernacular names, Remijia peruviana among them. A full-text search of the volume returns zero matches for "chullachaqui"; controls in the same volume the same day return 7 for "Remijia", 177 for "caspi" and 141 for "Iquitos".
1939 Francisco Izquierdo Ríos publishes Ande y Selva (Lima). Tale 32, pages 104-112, is the oldest printed appearance of the Chullachaqui we have been able to date. It names its informants — an aunt described as "una viejecita eximia relatadora de cuentos de Selva", a grandfather Nico, a don Pascual — and ends: "cuando el chullachaqui se transforma en gente siempre tiene una imperfección: la de su pie derecho, que es mucho más pequeño que el izquierdo". The small foot is the RIGHT one.
1941 Ciro Alegría's novel El mundo es ancho y ajeno includes a Chullachaqui episode built around Nara and the cacique Coranke, which explains the mournful song of a jungle bird: "Y ello se debe al maleficio de Chullachaqui". Alegría's creature is "el genio malo de la selva"; it drowns rubber tappers in lakes and rivers and leads them astray. Nothing is said about unequal feet.
1947 José María Arguedas and Izquierdo Ríos publish Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos, assembled from texts sent in by rural schoolteachers. It carries four Chullachaqui narratives, each credited to its collector: "El cazador y el Chullachaqui" (San Martín), by the preceptor Teófilo Peña; "El Chullachaqui" (San Martín), by the preceptora Angélica Reá; a second "El Chullachaqui" from Loreto; and "Los chanchitos" from Loreto. These named teachers are the source our earlier file had erased.
1948 Harriet de Onís includes the Chullachaqui episode in The Golden Land, her anthology of Latin American folklore in literature, under a footnote reading "Reprinted from Broad and Alien Is the World". The passage keeps its author but changes shelf: a chapter of a 1941 novel is now filed as folklore.
1949 Milton Rugoff reprints the same translated passage in A Harvest of World Folk Tales, which is reissued in 1968 and, as The Penguin Book of World Folk Tales, in 1977. Through this chain — novel, translation, anthology, mass-market paperback — most English-language readers meet the Chullachaqui as an anonymous folk tale rather than as a page by Ciro Alegría.
1952 In the novel En la tierra de los árboles, page 79, Izquierdo Ríos prints the flaw the other way round: "su pie izquierdo es chiquito, como de criatura recién nacida, como un bola de cerdas o bien como pata de jaguar". Between his own 1939 and 1952 books the small foot has changed sides, without comment.
1975 Pueblo y bosque. Folklore amazónico, pages 50-51, fixes the canonical version: "Chullachaqui, en quechua, significa 'pies desiguales'", the left foot small "como pie de criatura recién nacida, como bola de caucho o cerdoza, como pata de tigre o como una raíz de árbol, mientras el derecho es de tamaño normal", and "las gentes creen ver las huellas de sus pies en el barro de los caminos". This is the version every later retelling, ours included, has copied.
1994 The Amazonian Ethnobotanical Dictionary of James A. Duke and Rodolfo Vásquez, page 230, records the botanical Chullachaqui: "Remijia peruviana Standl. Rubiaceae. 'Chullachaqui caspi'. Iquitos children drink it during the new moon to become strong", plus "Chullachaqui blanco" (Pourouma ovata Trecul) and "Chullachaqui colorado" (Tovomita sp.). This whole dimension was missing from our previous file.
30 December 2009 The Spanish Wikipedia article "Chullachaqui" is created by the user Stuard202020, whose edit summary cites a page on the student-essay site monografias.com. That first version gives a different etymology — "chulla = falso; chaqui = pie", rendered "Falso pie" — and describes one human foot and one animal foot (deer, peccary, tortoise). It contains no cryptid classification.
18-21 March 2018 The conversion, dated to the minute. On 18 March the Wikimedia user LLs photographs a Chullachaqui statuette at Los Paucares Inn, Iquitos; on 21 March at 05:27 UTC the same user rewrites the Spanish Wikipedia article, uploads the photograph and adds a creature infobox whose "grupo" field reads "Críptido" and whose "subgrupo" reads "Criatura terrestre", sourcing the etymology to an Ecuadorian Ministry of Education Kichwa dictionary of 2009. That single edit is where the Chullachaqui became a cryptid — and that photograph is the one this file carries.
2019 Nécker Salazar Mejía, of the Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal, publishes "Seres imaginarios y motivos de la literatura oral en Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos" in Boletín de Literatura Oral 9, pages 223-248, analysing the four Chullachaqui tales of the 1947 compilation and glossing the name "del quechua «chulla», 'desigual', y «chaki», 'pie'". It is the named scholarship our previous text had dissolved into "studies of Amazonian oral literature".

Is there a rational explanation for Chullachaqui?

The honest conclusion of this file is a negative one, and it is measurable: nobody has ever proposed a zoological candidate for the Chullachaqui. Not a monkey, not a spectacled bear, not a sloth, not a surviving anything. It sits in cryptid catalogues — ours included — because it was filed there, not because a naturalist ever argued for it. That can be tested rather than asserted. A full-text search of Internet Archive's book corpus returns "chullachaqui" in twenty volumes: novels, folklore anthologies, ethnobotany, travel writing, a film annual. Not one is a work of cryptozoology. Control on the same corpus, run the same day: "mapinguari" — a genuinely converted Amazonian case — returns 176 hits including Tales of the Cryptids and Strange Creatures. On Cryptid Wiki, the largest amateur cryptid catalogue, a search for "chullachaqui" and "chullachaki" returns no article at all; control on the same search endpoint, "mapinguari" returns a full entry that argues Megatherium and "Slothfoot". English Wikipedia does not call the Chullachaqui a cryptid either; it calls it a mythical forest creature. So where did the label come from? From one edit. On 21 March 2018 the Spanish Wikipedia article was rewritten by the user LLs, who added a creature infobox whose "grupo" parameter reads "Críptido" and whose "subgrupo" reads "Criatura terrestre". Before that edit the article, created on 30 December 2009 by the user Stuard202020 from a page on the student-essay site monografias.com, contained no such classification — and gave a different etymology altogether: "chulla = falso; chaqui = pie", "Falso pie". The same 2018 edit attached the photograph of a statuette, taken three days earlier, that this very file uses. The conversion was a taxonomy field in a template, and it took ten minutes. There is also nothing stable to convert. The one physical trait a zoologist could work with — the mismatched foot — is the one datum the sources contradict each other on, and the contradiction is internal to a single author: right foot smaller in Izquierdo Ríos 1939, left foot smaller in the same man's 1952 and 1975 books. A creature whose defining anatomy flips between editions of its principal source is a narrative device, not a specimen. What the tales do contain is a recognisable and unremarkable core: dense, visually uniform rainforest disorients people who leave known trails, and children and lone hunters are exactly who is at risk. The 1947 texts also show how a victim gets out, and it is not what the tourist literature says: in the San Martín tale a priest blesses the paths and hills, and in the Loreto tale the young man makes the sign of the cross and calls on God. No curandero, no ayahuasca, no tobacco smoke. The claim, repeated across travel blogs and present in the earlier version of this file's source data, that escaping a Chullachaqui requires an ayahuasca ritual is not in the compilation those blogs ultimately depend on. And the 1939 text records a real cost that the charming versions drop: a young man in the Selva Alta killed his own father, believing him to be the Chullachaqui. On dating the story, two limits are declared rather than papered over. The oldest printed appearance we have been able to fix is Izquierdo Ríos, Ande y Selva, 1939; Ciro Alegría's novel follows in 1941. We could not push it earlier. The Field Museum's own Amazonian botany of the period does not help: "chullachaqui" returns zero matches in Llewelyn Williams's Woods of Northeastern Peru (1936) and in Standley's Studies of American Plants (1930), where Remijia peruviana was first described — the tree that would later carry the name in Duke (1994) is there under other vernaculars. Controls in those same volumes on the same day: "Remijia" 7 and 3 matches, "caspi" 177, "Iquitos" 141. Two archives that would settle it are closed to us: Chronicling America and HathiTrust both answer 403, and the Iquitos press of the rubber-boom decades — El Oriente and its contemporaries — is not digitised in any corpus we could reach. So: 1939 is the oldest print we can prove, not the age of the belief, and the two are not the same claim. Finally, the Chullachaqui is not the Curupira, and merging them is a real and traceable error. The Brazilian Curupira, printed as early as 1560, has feet turned backwards, so that its tracks lead the hunter the wrong way. The Chullachaqui's feet are unequal, so that its tracks reveal it is not human. Inverted and mismatched are different devices doing different narrative work. Derivative English-language pages describing a "backward-facing foot" on the Chullachaqui — the phrase appeared in the source record this file was built from — have fused the two.

Can you visit Chullachaqui?

There is no site to visit, and saying otherwise would be inventing one. The Chullachaqui belongs to the trails, the chacras and the streams of San Martín and Loreto, and to the books listed below; it has no shrine, no monument of its own and no fixed location. What the visitor to Iquitos will actually meet is the tourist-facing version of it. The photograph attached to this file is a case in point, and worth knowing before you read it as evidence: it shows a carved statuette photographed on 18 March 2018 at Los Paucares Inn, a lodging in Iquitos, and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons three days later under CC BY-SA 4.0. It is hotel decoration, not a traditional cult object, and nothing about the figure's hat, face or proportions should be treated as an ethnographic record. The nearest thing to a public representation is at the Complejo Turístico de Quistococha, the municipal park around Lake Quistococha at km 6.3 of the Iquitos–Nauta road, some 369 hectares with a small zoo, a museum, a nursery and a lake beach; a photograph of a Chullachaqui figure there is on Wikimedia Commons. Peruvian tourism listings give opening hours of 7:30 to 17:30 daily and an entrance fee of the order of 3 soles for adults and 1 sol for children — small sums that change often, so confirm locally rather than trusting this page. Mototaxi and colectivo from central Iquitos are the usual way there. The San Martín tales have real geography if you want it: the Cumbaza, the stream where the young woman of the 1947 collection was fishing, runs past Tarapoto and Lamas, and Saposoa, Izquierdo Ríos's home town, is in the same department. None of these places advertises the Chullachaqui and none should be visited expecting to. A warning worth printing. Chullachaqui caspi is a real plant used in Amazonian plant medicine, and it is sold as bark, powder and tea to visitors. This page documents the name; it is not a recommendation, there is no clinical evidence offered here for any preparation, and the ayahuasca-tourism industry around Iquitos is unregulated. Do not treat a folklore article as a shopping list. For reading rather than travelling: González Holguín's 1608 vocabulary is public domain and freely downloadable; Salazar Mejía's 2019 study is open access on Dialnet; Arguedas and Izquierdo Ríos's 1947 compilation is held by Peruvian libraries and searchable in Internet Archive's lending collection; Izquierdo Ríos's Ande y Selva (1939) and Pueblo y bosque (1975) are consulted here through Gonzalo Espino Relucé's transcription, which gives book and page for each quotation.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Chullachaqui

Where and when was Chullachaqui sighted?

What is Chullachaqui?

What is the history of Chullachaqui?

Timeline: the documented record of Chullachaqui

Is there a rational explanation for Chullachaqui?

Can you visit Chullachaqui?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

Chullachaqui

Where and when was Chullachaqui sighted?

What is Chullachaqui?

What is the history of Chullachaqui?

Timeline: the documented record of Chullachaqui

Is there a rational explanation for Chullachaqui?

Can you visit Chullachaqui?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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