Cuélebre

The cuélebre is the winged serpent of Asturian mythology, known also in Cantabria — where it is called culebre — and in León as culuebro, culebrón or sierpe. The definition set down by the folklorist Aurelio de Llano in 1922 is more precise than the creature's later reputation: «a winged serpent that guards treasure and enchanted persons», living in woods, in caves, and in springs with large underground cavities. It guards; it does not abduct. Its scale is hard enough to turn bullets, and it can be killed only by a wound to the throat. When it grows old and its scale thickens, God forbids it to remain here and it flies away to the mar cuajada, the curdled sea, where the old cuélebres watch over a seabed of riches no man can take. The name hides no mystery: it comes from Latin colŭbra, snake. Its written trail begins at least in 1885, in a ballad collected by Juan Menéndez Pidal in which the flying cuélebre guards an accursed castle and has swords for wings.

The cuélebre was not first written down in 1925, and the man who first recorded it methodically was not Constantino Cabal. On 24 July 1922, in Zumaya, Ramón Menéndez Pidal signed the preface to a book published that same year by the Talleres de Voluntad in Madrid: Del folklore asturiano: mitos, supersticiones, costumbres, by Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia. Menéndez Pidal praised the "stubborn enthusiasm" of a man who had walked the whole of Asturias gathering material. Llano was born in Caravia, at the foot of the Pico del Castro, and wrote that he had heard these stories as a child on the settle beside the hearth while the women spun. In 1918 he resolved to finish the collection "without a subsidy from anyone". In that book the cuélebre has a chapter of its own, pages 48 to 50, and a definition worth reading slowly, because it contradicts nearly everything now repeated about the creature: "The Cuélebre is a winged serpent that guards treasure and enchanted persons. It lives in woods, in caves, and in springs with large underground cavities." Guards. It does not abduct. The cuélebre of the Asturian springs is a sentry, not a kidnapper, and what it keeps is two things: the gold and the enchanted person. In the tales Llano collected, the one who enchants the girl is a sorcerer or her own father; the cuélebre arrives afterwards, to stand watch. Its scale, Llano says, is hard enough to turn bullets, and it can only be killed by a wound to the throat. The creature's end is the strangest part of the myth and precisely the part that drops out of summaries. When it grows old and heavily encascarado — when its scale has grown thick and hard — God forbids it to remain here and it flies away to the mar cuajada, the "curdled sea", where the old cuélebres expelled from their homes all live. At the bottom of that sea lie heaps of riches that no man can take, because the cuélebres are watching them. What makes Llano a source rather than a second-hand digest is that he records who told him each item, when, and where. Eusebio Fernández, aged 89, of Llerices in Cangas de Onís, told him on 9 March 1921 about the cuélebre of Vega de Cueturrasu, which came out of a cave to eat one sheep a day until it was caught in the fork of an oak. Carmen Peláez, aged 71, at Cardo in Gozón, gave him a variant of the disenchantment tale in April 1921. Ramón el Cano, aged 70, gave him another at Caravia in July 1920. And Ángeles Balbín, fifteen years old, of Caravia, had given him one already in August 1918. These are names our earlier entry had erased completely. Llano was no credulous enthusiast: he was the first to clean house. In the opening pages (pp. 3-5) he denounces the Busgoso, the Espumeros, the Ventolines and the Lavanderas as "myths brought in a few years ago by various writers" that "lack any Asturian tradition", and he corrects the error of the ayalgas — not enchanted maidens at all, but simply buried treasure, from Leonese-Asturian ayalga, 'a find', as R. Menéndez Pidal had shown in his 1906 study of the Leonese dialect. He corrects Rogelio Jove y Bravo (Mitos y supersticiones de Asturias, Oviedo, 1903), Félix de Aramburu (Monografía de Asturias, Oviedo, 1899) and Bernardo Acevedo (Boal y su concejo, Oviedo, 1898), and even retracts parts of his own Libro de Caravia of 1919. After that sifting, his list of genuine Asturian mythology is short: the Nuberu, the Xanas, the Cuélebre, the Sirena, the Trasgu, the mocking Devil, the Güestia, the Witch, and the Enchantments of Midsummer morning. That the cuélebre survived the filter says more about its authenticity than any amount of later repetition. And it is older than Llano. In 1885 Juan Menéndez Pidal — Ramón's elder brother — had published in Madrid Poesía popular, his collection of the ballads sung at the danza prima, the esfoyazas and the filandones. In ballad LXXXVII, "La muerte del impío", the traitor marquis's castle is left accursed and no one may approach: "Woe to him who came near! / A crimson dragon guards it, / the flying cuélebre: / it has swords for wings, / and it killed all who came" (pp. 258-259). In another ballad, "La pastorcilla", a mother fears "lest some culebro enchant her", and Juan Menéndez Pidal notes at the foot of the page: "In Asturias the dragon is called indifferently cuélebre and culebro" (p. 226). That footnote from 1885 is also the key to the name. Xosé Lluis García Arias's Diccionario General de la Lengua Asturiana records cuélebre with senses that begin at the most ordinary level: "male snake", "large snake", and only then "the dragon of Asturian mythology". Behind it stands Latin colŭbra, 'snake'. In his Manual elemental de gramática histórica española (1904, §13), Ramón Menéndez Pidal sets out the sound change: from cólobram (for colŭbra) comes the old Spanish culuebra, with a diphthong, and from that the modern culebra, which loses it. Asturian kept the diphthong that Castilian levelled out. Put plainly: the cuélebre is, literally and without metaphor, the big snake — the bestiary came afterwards. Constantino Cabal (Oviedo, 1877-1967) reached this material later and by another route. He began publishing folklore in 1923, after Llano and by his own account influenced by him, and his mythological work is not a single 1925 book but a series of three volumes under the shared title La mitología asturiana: Los dioses de la muerte and Los dioses de la vida, both 1925 — the latter printed in Madrid by Juan Pueyo, 341 pages — and El sacerdocio del diablo, 1928. Cabal wrote copiously, but his work dates from 1925 onwards: for the cuélebre it is neither the earliest nor the closest to the informant. For the cuélebre, the source that holds up is the one from 1922.

The cuélebre has no address. What it has is a map, and Llano drew it in 1922: "the geographical distribution of the Cuélebre myth is roughly the same as that of the Xanas" — that is, wherever there are caves and springs. This is worth saying first because it shapes the visit: you do not go to see a cuélebre, you go to see the landscape that produced it — limestone, sinkholes, springs rising straight out of rock, and caves with large underground cavities. The places Llano named (p. 49) are real place names, not attractions. In the east: the treasure cave at Buelnes, in the council of Llanes; the Cueva del Cuélebre at Noriega, in Ribadedeva; and the cuélebre of Vega de Cueturrasu, in Cangas de Onís. In the centre and west: Piedrafita, between Morcín and Quirós; the Prado del Cuélebre at El Xienal, in Quirós; Cuevafrás, above Barrio in Teverga, where shepherds passing by would chant "Cuelebrón de Cuevafrás, / baxa al riu y beberás"; Saliencia and the Valdecuélebre summer pasture, in Somiedo; and Brañaseca, in Cudillero, whose rhyme — "Open your mouth, Cuelebrón, / here comes the maize loaf" — is probably the best-remembered scrap of the whole myth. None of them is signposted as a tourist draw: they are place names on hillsides and upland pastures, many on private or common land, and several lie within the Somiedo or Ponga-Redes natural parks, with their own rules. Two warnings about places the earlier entry treated as intact. First: the Culebrón cave that Llano placed "behind the convent of Santo Domingo" in Oviedo belongs to a complex that is no longer the one he knew. The convent, founded in 1518, was burned and badly damaged after the October 1934 revolution; of the original only the church — declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in 1944 and today a parish church — and part of the cloister survive, and the surroundings are built up. We have not been able to confirm that the cave is still identifiable. Second: at Allande, in the church of Santa María de Celón, Llano wrote that the scene of the pilgrim killing the cuélebre with his spear was carved on a stone beneath the outer cornice of the apse, and noted that he saw it on 6 November 1921. The church exists and is protected as a Bien de Interés Cultural, but anyone going in search of that stone should know we are quoting a 1921 eyewitness note and have not found a modern description confirming it in place. If you look for it, look from outside, at the apse. For the myth explained properly and under a roof, the place is the Muséu del Pueblu d'Asturies, the ethnographic museum run by the city council of Xixón (Gijón). And to read the sources without travelling at all: Llano's 1922 book and Juan Menéndez Pidal's 1885 ballads are digitised and in the public domain on archive.org, linked at the foot of this entry.