El Coco

Its oldest dated definition sits not in a folklore book but in a chronicle of Portuguese India: around 1553, João de Barros explains that his countrymen named the palm nut a coco because that was the word women applied "to anything with which they try to frighten children". The fruit took its name from the bogey, not the other way round. A year later, in 1554, the word surfaces in Lazarillo de Tormes in a scene of unexpected cruelty: Lázaro's baby brother points at his own father, who is Black, and shouts "Mother, coco!" By the time Goya etched Que viene el Coco in 1799, plate three of Los Caprichos, the formula had been in print for two and a half centuries — and the contemporary commentators who annotated the series saw in it not a ghost but an accusation: "the disastrous abuse of early education… forcing him to fear what does not exist."

The Coco enters the written record as a word, more than two centuries before Goya's plate of 1799. The earliest dated definition among this file's sources is in a chronicle of the Portuguese expansion into Asia. Around 1553, João de Barros explains in his Década III why his countrymen call the Indian palm nut a coco: the Portuguese gave it "the name of COCO, a word applied by women to anything with which they try to frighten children", and the name stuck because nobody knew any other — the proper one was tenga among the Malabars and narle among the Canarins. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell reproduce and translate the passage in Hobson-Jobson (1886), alongside the other two witnesses to the naming: Garcia de Orta, writing from Goa in 1563, says "we have given it the name of coco, because it looks like the face of a monkey", and Cristóvão da Costa adds in 1578 that the Portuguese call it coco "because of those three holes that it has". In Barros's explanation the word already existed, as women's speech for frightening children, when the Portuguese gave it to the nut: the fruit took its name from the bogey. "Mother, coco!" A year after Barros, the word turns up in Castilian literature, and it arrives through an uncomfortable door. In Lazarillo de Tormes, printed in 1554, the little boy Lázaro calls his brother — son of his mother and of Zaide, a Black stablehand — sees his own father and bolts: "because the child saw my mother and me white, and him not, he ran from him in fear to my mother, and pointing with his finger said: 'Mother, coco!'". The father laughs. And Lázaro, still a child himself, records the line that turns the joke into something else: "How many there must be in the world who run from others because they cannot see themselves." In the Lazarillo the Coco is what a child calls a face he does not recognise, and the Spanish Academy would still cite the passage as an authority for the word in 1729. The dictionaries pin it down Sebastián de Covarrubias gives the word three separate entries in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611). One is the fruit, where he repeats the Portuguese argument: "The Spaniards gave it the name of coco because of the little face formed by the three holes, which look like eyes and a mouth." Another is kermes, the scarlet dye. The third is ours: "Coco, in the speech of children, means a figure that causes fright, and none so much as those that are in the dark, or show a black colour." Covarrubias then offers a biblical etymology, deriving it from Cush, descendant of Ham, "who reigned in Ethiopia, land of the Blacks". The etymology records that by 1611 the word already carried the racial charge that Lazarillo had staged half a century earlier. The Diccionario de Autoridades (vol. II, 1729) defines it by what it is for: "A frightful and ugly figure, or a cry like a monkey's, made to frighten and restrain children." Among its supporting authorities it cites the Lazarillo passage. It also records the set phrase "Guarda el coco", illustrated from Lope de Vega's La Dorotea, whose example itself goes back to Lazarillo: "You are like the little Black boy of Lazarillo de Tormes, who when his father came in said, very frightened, mother, guarda el coco." The same entry quotes an interlude by Quevedo in which a thief threatens in song: "Give me the purse. Coco, coco, coco!" Goya, 1799 By the time Francisco de Goya etched Que viene el Coco, plate three of Los Caprichos, the formula had been in print for two and a half centuries. The print — etching and burnished aquatint, 219 × 154 mm — carries its title engraved below the image and the mark "P.3." in the upper right corner. The ones screaming are the children: one throws up his arms to flee, the other clutches at his mother, who stays seated, holds both of them and raises her eyes towards a standing shape wrapped entirely in cloth, faceless. What makes the case exceptional is that the contemporary manuscript commentaries explaining each plate survive, and all three discuss this one. The Museo Nacional del Prado manuscript says the print "represents the disastrous abuse of early education. Making a child more afraid of the Coco than of his own father, and forcing him to fear what does not exist." The Ayala manuscript is sharper: mothers "frighten their children with the Coco so they can talk to their lovers". The Biblioteca Nacional manuscript combines both readings: "foolish mothers make their children fearful by conjuring the Coco; and worse ones use this trick to be alone with their lovers when they cannot get their children away from them." Lorca, 1928 The best account of how the Coco works was written by a poet. In his lecture Las nanas infantiles, Federico García Lorca observed: "The magical power of the 'coco' is precisely its blurredness. It can never appear, though it prowls the rooms. And the delightful thing is that it stays blurred for everyone." He then added a correction almost nobody quotes: "But Spain is not fond of the 'coco'. It prefers to frighten with real beings. In the South, the 'bull' and the 'Moorish queen' are the threats; in Castile, the 'she-wolf' and the 'gypsy woman'." Galicia, Portugal and the Americas The claim that "the myth of the Coco, or Cucuy, originated in northern Portugal and Galicia" is made in the English Wikipedia article "Coco (folklore)" (read on 25 September 2026). The sentence carries no citation of its own, and the reference that follows it supports only the use of coco for the human head. What is documented in the north-west of the peninsula is a related but distinct figure: the Coca, which the Dicionario da Real Academia Galega defines as a "legendary figure representing a monstrous serpent, brought out in some processions and popular festivals", giving the coca of Redondela as its example and tarasca as its synonym. The child-scaring coco is alive in Galician too, and the Academy records it with a domestic example: "Se non comes todo, vaiche vir o coco" ("if you don't eat it all, the coco will come for you"). Eloy Martos Núñez, of the Universidad de Extremadura, describes the Ibero-American case as syncretic: under a single name — Coco, Cuco, Cucuy — "very different images may be beating", contaminated by Indigenous and African figures and overlapping with the sack man and the sacamantecas.

El Coco has no site, and the only physical things the tradition has left are Goya's plate and the objects around it. The print Que viene el coco is plate 3 of Los Caprichos, an etching with burnished aquatint of 219 × 154 mm, catalogued as inventory 225 in the online catalogue of the Fundación Goya en Aragón, which is free and asks for no registration. The preparatory drawing, in black and red chalk on laid paper and measuring 198 × 140 mm, is at the Museo Nacional del Prado under inventory number D. 4208; like all works on paper it appears in rotations rather than on permanent display. The original copper plate is number 174 of the Calcografía Nacional, inside the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando at calle de Alcalá 13, Madrid 28014, a few minutes on foot from Puerta del Sol. On 10 September 2026 the Academia's own tariff page gave general admission at 10 euros and the reduced ticket at 5 euros, with the museum open from 10:00 to 15:00 and free entry from 13:30 to 15:00 Tuesday to Friday outside holidays. Guided visits to the museum run Tuesday to Friday at 11:00 and to the Goya cabinet on Thursdays at 12:00. The nearest surviving relative of the figure is the Coca, which the Dicionario da Real Academia Galega defines as a monstrous serpent taken out at some processions and popular festivals, and whose example is the coca of Redondela in Pontevedra, paraded at Corpus Christi.