El Cuero

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 dictionaries fix it. 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 closer to "the wekufe's hide" than to "the monster's skin", and the second half of the compound names something wider than a monster. 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, who rendered it as "el diablo", was a Capuchin missionary. 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, and the contempt is the ethnographer's. 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, some 900 kilometres north of Guevara's informants on the Quepe and at Cholchol. From Coquimbo to Chiloé, wherever there was water people crossed or bathed in, there was a hide waiting in it.

The pin on this page sits at 38.8° S, 72.6° W, about 7 km south of Temuco in the Cautín valley. That is where Guevara's two informants were recorded: one on the río Quepe and one at Cholchol. It is also the closest thing this file has to a located attestation, because no source read for it ties el cuero to lakes Villarrica, Ranco or Panguipulli by name. The collectors placed the creature 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 alongside those two Guevara informants near Temuco. The three lakes straddle the regional border: Villarrica and Pucón, in La Araucanía, are reached from Temuco, the nearest city with an airport; CONAF routes the drive along Ruta 5 Sur and then Ruta 199, "(112 km) pasar por Villarrica y antes de ingresar a Pucón debes tomar el Camino al volcán". Valdivia and Osorno are the bases for Panguipulli and Lago Ranco, in Los Ríos. Parque Nacional Villarrica covers 53,460 hectares across Villarrica, Pucón and Curarrehue in La Araucanía and Panguipulli in Los Ríos; CONAF states that "Es parte de la Reserva de Biósfera Araucarias, creada por la UNESCO en el año 1983", and its Rucapillán control station stands 8 km from Pucón on the volcano road. Parque Nacional Huerquehue covers 12,500 hectares of araucaria forest, with mountain lakes. It lies in the communes of Pucón and Cunco, 135 km from Temuco, reached only by the Pucón-Caburgua road with the detour at Paillaco, the last 8 km unpaved. Reserva Nacional Mocho-Choshuenco, 7,536.50 hectares created in March 1994 across the communes of Panguipulli, Futrono and Los Lagos, is reached from Valdivia along the shore of Lago Panguipulli to the village of Choshuenco on Ruta 230, and CONAF's page for it says "Los buses salen desde Panguipulli tres veces al día. El último bus desde Choshuenco a Panguipulli sale a las 19.00." The CONAF area office is at Carlos Acharán 263, Panguipulli, telephone +56 63 231 1025. Tickets and hours are sold only through pasesparques.cl, and these parks do close. Checked on 11 September 2026, CONAF's pages carry three live notices. Huerquehue's reads "La atención a público se reanuda desde el 12 de agosto de 2026, pero solo hasta el sector de Nido del Águila", with the Quinchol and San Sebastián trails shut "hasta el 15 de diciembre de 2026". Villarrica's says "El sendero al glaciar Pichillancahue no estará habilitado para excursiones desde el 25 de julio al 15 de septiembre de 2026, inclusive", and its weekly maintenance closure falls on Mondays, with an announced exception for Monday 12 October 2026 and the closure postponed to Tuesday 13 October. Mocho-Choshuenco's reads "Desde el 8 de agosto de 2026: ingreso solo con vehículos 4 ✕ 4 y con uso de cadenas. Acceso por Choshuenco." A national outbreak of high-pathogenicity avian influenza is in force across protected areas. Fires are prohibited and drones need authorisation. The lakes carry the hazard the story gave them. They are deep glacial lakes, cold all year, with abrupt shelving. The wind gets up in the afternoon, and supervision exists only in high summer and only in the towns. The wekufe belongs to a religion that is practised today, and the Mapuche communities that run tourism around Curarrehue, Panguipulli and Lago Ranco set their own terms for visitors.