El Cuero

El cuero — "the hide" — is an aquatic being of Mapuche and Chilean tradition, described as an octopus the size and shape of a cowhide stretched flat, edged the whole way round with claws, that wraps around whatever enters the water and drags it under. Its Mapudungun name, trülke wekufü, joins trəlke, hide, with wekufe: not a monster but the category of harmful agency behind illness and misfortune, which Rodolfo Lenz defined as "more a force than a person". Juan Ignacio Molina reported the belief in 1782, noting that the Indians never bathed in the lakes that held it and that the animal probably existed only in their imaginations. Tomás Guevara fixed the description and the drawing in 1908, printed the testimony of two named Mapuche informants — Manqueo of the río Quepe and Lorenzo Manquián of Cholchol — and, in the same paragraph, gave the explanation: a man who sinks and does not resurface, snagged on sunken timber or in a silted bed, "has been taken by the trelquehuecufe". Julio Vicuña Cifuentes collected three oral variants in 1915, at Talagante, Buin with Coihueco de Chillán, and Concepción on the Bío-Bío.

The creature has a name in Mapudungun, and the name is the first thing worth getting right. Félix José de Augusta's Diccionario araucano-español (1916) glosses trəlke as "el cuero, pellejo" — hide, pelt — and wekufü as "el diablo; el flechazo del demonio", the dart a machi mimes drawing out of a sick body. Trülke wekufü is therefore not "the monster's skin" but something closer to "the wekufe's hide". And the second half of that compound is not a monster at all. Rodolfo Lenz, in his Diccionario etimolójico de las voces chilenas (entry 609), defines huecúvu as "un ser mítico de los mapuches, especie de jénio del mal, de quien provienen enfermedades i otras desgracias", and adds the sentence that matters: "Es mas bien una fuerza que una persona." A wekufe is a category of harm-doing agency in Mapuche cosmology — the reason illness, accident and misfortune happen — and el cuero is one of the shapes that agency takes in water. Augusta's flat gloss "el diablo" is a Capuchin missionary's shorthand, not a translation. The oldest printed trace is a denial. The Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina, in the natural history of Chile he published from Italian exile in 1782, wrote of an animal of monstrous size that the Indians said lived in certain lakes and called guruvilu, the fox-snake: "They believe that it devours men, and on that account never bathe in those lakes. But the descriptions which they give of its size and form scarcely ever agree: some representing it as having the body of a serpent with the head of a fox; others, as being of a circular form, and resembling an inflated ox-hide." Molina's verdict, in the 1808 English translation, p. 162: "It is, however, probable that this animal has no other existence than in the imaginations of these people." His contemporary Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre wrote almost the same thing — some make it long like a serpent with a fox's head, "quién cuasi circular como un cuero de vaca extendido; yo dudo mucho de la existencia de tal animal." The hide and the fox-snake were tangled together from the first page either of them appeared on, and folklorists have been separating them ever since. The systematic record is a century younger and it belongs to two men. Tomás Guevara, in Psicolojía del pueblo araucano (1908), fixed the description and drew it: "Trelquehuecufe (cuero huecuve) llaman los indios a un pulpo de las dimensiones de una piel de ternero, armado de garras en todo su alrededor. Habita en las honduras de los rios i lagunas, donde toma a los hombres i animales que atraviesan o se bañan en esos parajes i los mata por medio de una contracción irresistible." His plate — Fig. 42, no. 5, alongside the pihuicheñ, the chonchón, the colocolo, the ngürüvilu and the huaillepeñ — is the image nearly every later drawing descends from: a flat pelt fringed the whole way round with claws. Guevara's real value is that he printed his informants' words and their names. From Manqueo, of the río Quepe: "En el rio Quepe hai un remanso. Un mapuche fué a bañarse ahí. Se tiró al agua. Inmediatamente se sumerjió. No salió mas. Cuatro días lo buscaron. Imposible hallarlo. Hallan pronto a otros ahogados. Entónces todos dijeron: 'Hai trelquehuecufe'. Nadie se ha bañado mas en esa laguna." From Lorenzo Manquián, of Cholchol, a first-person sighting: walking to the river's edge one afternoon he saw on the shingle "una cosa como cuero de ternero, color café, con pintas blanquizcas", ringed with claws; he ran home, came back with his father, and it was gone. Those two accounts, with those two names, are the closest thing to eyewitness testimony the record holds — and they are printed inside a book whose framing chapters describe the Mapuche as an inferior race with a sterilised intellect. The testimony is theirs; the contempt is the ethnographer's, and it is worth saying so out loud. Seven years later Julio Vicuña Cifuentes gathered the Chilean-Spanish side in Mitos y supersticiones recogidos de la tradición oral chilena (1915). Chapter XI, El Cuero, runs to two pages and gives three oral variants, each tagged with the place it was collected. From Talagante: an octopus the size and shape of a perfectly stretched cowhide, "las orillas están guarnecidas de innumerables ojos, y en la parte que parece ser la cabeza, tiene cuatro más de mayor tamaño." From Buin and Coihueco de Chillán: the same animal, strong enough to drag horse and rider under at once, and killed by throwing a length of quisco cactus into the water for it to wrap around and shred itself on. From Concepción: a monster living in the Bío-Bío whose "origen fué un cuero de asno que botaron al río, donde cobró vida y se desarrolló." Vicuña adds, in one line, "Es mito de origen araucano", then reprints Cavada on Chiloé, where the creature is called la Manta and is "el terror de los niños que se bañan", and Lenz's dictionary entry, which describes it as "animal fabuloso de la mitolojía chilena que vive en el agua i hace daño a los que pasan o se bañan." Add the rest of the map and the being turns out to be almost national. Lenz collected it in Ñuble and, in his second supplement, in Los Ángeles and on the Frontera. Bernardo Gotschlich, surveying Llanquihue and Valdivia for the Boletín del Museo Nacional de Chile in 1913, listed "el telquehuécuve, un ser parecido a la jibia" — a cuttlefish rather than an octopus. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna had reported one in the marshy lagoon of Viña del Mar in 1877. José Silvestre described it under the name Huecú in the Ovalle newspaper El Obrero in 1904, six hundred kilometres north. From Coquimbo to Chiloé, wherever there was water people crossed or bathed in, there was a hide waiting in it.

One honest caveat before the practicalities: no source read for this file ties el cuero to lakes Villarrica, Ranco or Panguipulli by name. The collectors placed it in Talagante, Buin, Coihueco de Chillán, the Bío-Bío at Concepción, Ñuble, Los Ángeles, Ovalle, Viña del Mar and across Chiloé, and the nearest documented attestations to the southern lakes are Gotschlich's 1913 survey of Llanquihue and Valdivia and Guevara's two informants on the río Quepe and at Cholchol, both near Temuco. What you can visit in the lake district is the landscape and the living Mapuche communities, not a monster's address. The three lakes sit either side of the regional border. Villarrica and Pucón (La Araucanía) are reached from Temuco, the nearest city with an airport, by Route 5 South and then Route 199; CONAF gives the distance from Temuco to Parque Nacional Huerquehue as 135 km. Panguipulli and Lago Ranco (Los Ríos) are reached from Valdivia or Osorno. Parque Nacional Villarrica covers 53,460 hectares across the communes of Villarrica, Pucón, Curarrehue and Panguipulli and is part of the UNESCO Araucarias Biosphere Reserve; its Rucapillán sector is 8 km from Pucón on the volcano road. Parque Nacional Huerquehue, 12,500 hectares of araucaria forest and mountain lakes, is reached only by the Pucón-Caburgua road with a detour at Paillaco, the last 8 km unpaved, and closes on Mondays for maintenance. Reserva Nacional Mocho-Choshuenco, in the communes of Panguipulli, Futrono and Los Lagos, is reached from Valdivia along the shore of Lago Panguipulli to the village of Choshuenco on Route 230; buses run three times a day from Panguipulli, last return 19:00. CONAF's Panguipulli office is at Carlos Acharán 263, tel. +56 63 231 1025. Check before you go, because these parks close. Tickets and current hours are sold only through the official portal pasesparques.cl. As of 11 August 2026 both Parque Nacional Villarrica and Parque Nacional Huerquehue were shut to the public because of severe weather; access to Mocho-Choshuenco from Choshuenco required a 4x4 with chains; the glacier trails in Villarrica were closed from 25 July to 31 December 2026; and a national outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza was in force across protected areas. Fires are prohibited and drones need authorisation. The water deserves the story's own warning. These lakes are glacial, deep and cold year-round, the shelving is abrupt, the wind gets up in the afternoon, and beaches are supervised only in high summer and only in the towns. Swim from patrolled beaches, keep children in arm's reach, and treat quiet dark coves as what the folklore always said they were: the wrong place to get in. And if you visit Mapuche communities offering tourism around Curarrehue, Panguipulli or Lago Ranco, go on their terms — the wekufe is part of a living religion, not a mascot.