🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555 ACTIVE

Ucumar

The Ucumar is the man-bear of northwestern Argentina and southern Bolivia, and its name settles most of the argument before it starts.

Where and when was Ucumar sighted?

Location: Noroeste argentino, Argentina
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: -23.609, -64.818
Last updated: 2026-10-04

LOCATION

What is Ucumar?

Ucumari in Quechua and hucumari in Aymara simply mean bear: the entries are printed in the vocabulary issued in Lima by Antonio Ricardo in 1586, in Diego González Holguín's Quechua dictionary of 1608 and in Ludovico Bertonio's Aymara dictionary of 1612, and the animal is Tremarctos ornatus, the Andean bear. In folklore the Ucumar is not a shy forest creature but the villain of an abduction tale: Berta Vidal de Battini published seven versions collected in Salta, Jujuy and Formosa, and classified them within the international Bear's Son cycle. The word was in print as the name of a creature at large by 7 September 1901, in a news story in which the Ucumar turns out to be an ex-convict named Pedro Ocampo. It became a candidate species only in 1961, when Ivan T. Sanderson filed three Argentine press clippings alongside the yeti. Meanwhile the zoologists have a harder problem: since 2012 the published evidence has not been enough to show that the bear itself lives in Argentina at all.

What is the history of Ucumar?

The Ucumar is the only creature in this catalogue whose name can be looked up in a dictionary printed before 1600, and the dictionary settles the question. In 1586 the printer Antonio Ricardo — the first printing press in South America — issued in Lima the anonymous Arte, y vocabulario en la lengua general del Peru llamada Quichua, y en la lengua española. It carries the word twice, once in each direction. In the Quechua-to-Spanish half: "Vcumari. osso animal." In the Spanish-to-Quechua half: "Osso animal. vcumari." No epithet, no legend, no qualifier. Bear, the animal. Diego González Holguín repeated it in his Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qquichua o del Inca (Lima, 1608): "Osso animal. Vcumari." Four years later the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio, working at Juli on Lake Titicaca, printed the Aymara equivalent in his Vocabulario de la lengua aymara (1612): "Osso animal. Hucumari." Three independent lexicons, two languages, twenty-six years, one gloss. The animal they were glossing is Tremarctos ornatus, the Andean or spectacled bear — the only bear in South America, and still called jucumari across Bolivia today. So the folklore starts from a known animal, and what it does with that animal is tell a story that folklorists have catalogued. In volume VIII of Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina (Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, Buenos Aires, 1984), the folklorist Berta Elena Vidal de Battini printed seven versions of "El Ucumar", numbered 2304 to 2310, at pages 821 to 831: two from Salta, four from Jujuy and one from Formosa, collected between 1950 and 1959 from narrators she names, among them two schoolteachers, a ranch hand and a ninety-year-old countryman. The first, told by Basilio Mamani at Las Costas, Salta, in 1953, opens: "El Ucumar es como un oso, como un hombre oso", living in caves in the ravines, and it "roba a las mujeres y las lleva a vivir con él". Six of the seven speak of people, almost always women, carried off to the hills; in the Formosa version a female Ucumar takes a young man, and in one from Jujuy the narrator says he saw the Ucumari standing in a maize field at dusk, eating the cobs. Her note to the series identifies the bear who steals a woman and fathers a son "de aptitudes especiales y de gran fuerza" with the traditional tale of the bear-man, and a footnote identifies the animal with the spectacled bear, Tremarctos ornatus, which "en nuestras provincias de Salta y Jujuy se le llama generalmente ucumar". Graciela Hernández, in footnote 6 of a 2018 article in Revista nuestrAmérica, adds that Vidal de Battini placed the tales in Aarne-Thompson types 301 A and 301 B — the Bear's Son cycle, Juan del Oso, Jean de l'Ours — and that her volume VI holds three versions of "El hijo del oso" from San Luis, Jujuy and La Rioja. The Formosa version comes with its provenance, which matters because Formosa is Chaco lowland, far from the yungas cloud forest. Vidal de Battini records that her narrator there, Ruperto Montenegro, a 42-year-old ranch hand at Las Lomitas in Patiño department, speaks in a manner and a language "que se acercan a los campesinos del noroeste", and that the motif "es general en Jujuy y en el norte de Salta". The tale travels further than the animal does. Half a century before those collections, the word was already in print as the name of a creature at large, in a news item. On 7 September 1901, the Buenos Aires weekly Caras y Caretas, issue 153, ran a photo feature headed "Rapto de una niña por el Ucumar". Its opening sentence is a definition: "Con este vocablo designa el pueblo de Tucumán al legendario personaje que vive en el seno de los bosques, alejado de los hombres." The report then describes what the police actually caught, on the estate of Napoleón Paz at Las Cuchillas: a man "que viste ropas de cuero y usa utensilios y armas ofensivas y defensivas de las que usaban los hombres primitivos", who "vivía en el bosque y jamás nadie lo había visto". The girl with him, dressed as he was, was thirteen and had been taken at eleven; the magazine names her, María Natividad, daughter of José Agustín Silva of La Ramada, Burruyacú, and says she was returned to her father. And it names the man: "El Ucumar llamado Pedro Ocampo adoptó la vida salvaje hace muchos años, después de haber salido de la cárcel." The captions call him "El Ucumar Pedro Ocampo (a) el Carancho". The Tucumán historian Carlos Páez de la Torre (h) brought the page back into circulation in La Gaceta in July 2019, which is how the case reached the modern press. Before the Ucumar was a cryptid it was also a book title. By 1920 the Hispanic Society's Argentines of Today was listing El Ucumar among the works of Ricardo Rojas, describing it as "a short novel of country life"; the National Union Catalog and the OpenLibrary record register a second, Ucumar, novela autóctona argentina, by Pedro Heredia, published in Buenos Aires by El Ateneo in 1944. The word had a literary career in Argentina for at least four decades before anybody proposed it as a species.

Timeline: the documented record of Ucumar

1586 The anonymous Arte, y vocabulario en la lengua general del Peru llamada Quichua is printed in Lima by Antonio Ricardo, the first press in South America. It glosses the word in both directions: "Vcumari. osso animal" in the Quechua-Spanish half, "Osso animal. vcumari" in the Spanish-Quechua half. The same book glosses "Diablo" as çupay.
1608 Diego González Holguín's Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qquichua o del Inca, the most cited of the colonial Quechua dictionaries, repeats the entry in its Spanish-Quechua book: "Osso animal. Vcumari".
1612 The Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio prints his Vocabulario de la lengua aymara at Juli, on Lake Titicaca. The Spanish-Aymara half carries the Aymara equivalent: "Osso animal. Hucumari". The gloss is now attested in two Andean languages and three independent lexicons within twenty-six years.
7 September 1901 Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires), issue 153, publishes "Rapto de una niña por el Ucumar", an early printed use of the word as the name of a creature at large. The report itself identifies the captured "Ucumar" as Pedro Ocampo, alias el Carancho, an ex-convict living in the forest, and names the girl found with him as María Natividad, daughter of José Agustín Silva of La Ramada, Burruyacú, returned to her father.
1920 The Hispanic Society of America's Argentines of Today lists El Ucumar among the published works of Ricardo Rojas, calling it "a short novel of country life". This fixes the word as a literary title in Argentina no later than 1920; a second novel, Pedro Heredia's Ucumar, novela autóctona argentina, follows from El Ateneo in 1944.
1957 According to Sanderson, the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Ultima Hora reports large human-like footprints in Salta province and a newspaperman finding the village of "Tolor Grande" in turmoil over night-time cries from the "Curu-Curu Mountains", said to be the haunt of the Ukumar-zupai. The village is Tolar Grande, at about 3,520 m in the Puna de Atacama, surrounded by salt flats — treeless desert, and not bear country under any reading.
1961 Ivan T. Sanderson publishes Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (Chilton, Philadelphia). On page 388 he sets three South American clippings "that Bernard Heuvelmans has sent me" — the 1956 tracks of the geologist Audio L. Pich, the 1957 Ultima Hora report, and a 1958 Chilean "ape-man" case — inside his global scheme of unknown hominids. This is the conversion: from that page on, the ucumar is filed with the yeti and the sasquatch rather than with the bear.
1984 Berta Elena Vidal de Battini publishes seven versions of "El Ucumar", collected between 1950 and 1959 in Salta, Jujuy and Formosa, at pages 821-831 of volume VIII of Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina, and links them in her note to the traditional tale of the bear-man; Graciela Hernández (2018) reports that she classified them as Aarne-Thompson types 301 A and 301 B. In the Formosa version a female Ucumar carries off a young man.
2012 Rumiz, Brown, Perovic, Chalukian, Cuyckens, Jayat, Falke and Ramadori publish "El ucumar (Tremarctos ornatus), mito y realidad de su presencia en la Argentina" in Mastozoología Neotropical, setting 34 published records against more than 800 survey points that found jaguar, tapir and monkeys but no bear, and concluding that there is not sufficient evidence to assert that T. ornatus is present in Argentina.
July 2019 The Tucumán historian Carlos Páez de la Torre (h) publishes "Un 'Ucumar' tucumano" in La Gaceta, bringing the 1901 Caras y Caretas page back into circulation. The photograph — a man in a cap, hides across his chest, a cloth bag in hand — has since been recoloured and recirculated online as "the image that frightened Tucumán".
21 April 2022 The Salta daily El Tribuno publishes the account of Ángel Armando Pacheco, a 52-year-old former boxer, who says that on the night of 12 April, at Pasteadero Chico near Metán, he lit up "esa cosa, era como un gorila grande, peludo y color oscuro" at about 25 metres. He gives his name and face; no photograph, cast, hair or genetic sample results from the episode.
2022 Abba and twenty-eight co-authors publish the 2019 categorisation of Argentine mammals in Mastozoología Neotropical. Of the entire national mammal fauna, one species was left unassessed: "una especie no fue evaluada (Tremarctos ornatus) debido a controversias con respecto a su presencia en territorio argentino". That is still the official position as of August 2026.

Is there a rational explanation for Ucumar?

The usual sceptical line for the Ucumar is that witnesses are seeing an Andean bear rear up on its hind legs. It is a tidy explanation and it has a hole in it: there may be no bears. In 2012 eight Argentine and Bolivian mammalogists — Damián I. Rumiz, Alejandro D. Brown, Pablo G. Perovic, Silvia C. Chalukian, G. A. Erica Cuyckens, Pablo Jayat, Fernando Falke and Daniel Ramadori — published in Mastozoología Neotropical a paper whose title is the whole argument: "El ucumar (Tremarctos ornatus), mito y realidad de su presencia en la Argentina". They took the 34 georeferenced published records claimed for the species in northwestern Argentina, all falling between 22º21'–24º15'S and 64º09'–65º12'W, and set them against more than 800 survey points from the same region — 403 sign-and-interview points, 166 interviews in transhumant grazing areas, and more than 270 camera-trap stations — which had produced jaguar, tapir, monkeys and carnivore attacks on livestock, and no bear. Their conclusion is verbatim: "los autores de esta nota sostenemos que no existe evidencia suficiente para afirmar que T. ornatus está presente en Argentina." They also record that reports of this kind had led the 2008 IUCN assessment to credit Argentina with a population of some 400 bears, a figure quietly deleted in the following version. When the 2019 categorisation of Argentine mammals was published in 2022 by Abba and twenty-eight co-authors, one species in the entire national fauna was left unassessed, and it was this one: "una especie no fue evaluada (Tremarctos ornatus) debido a controversias con respecto a su presencia en territorio argentino." As of August 2026 that remains the status. On the Bolivian side, the 2012 paper notes, peasants describe the bear correctly and have shown tracks or animals killed as far south as Tarija; visits in 2011 to southern Tarija, near the Argentine border, found no sign of it where it had been reported a few years before. The same 2012 paper is also the best field description of how the sightings are produced, and it is unusually blunt about the incentive. In northwestern Argentina, the authors write, "la realidad zoológica se mezcla con el mito y el ucumar representa un ser sobrenatural, cuyo aspecto no siempre concuerda con el del oso", starring in stories "generalmente oídas de terceros" about cries heard in the forest, stones pushed down slopes, and people abducted and sexually assaulted by this being. They add that local people enjoy telling these stories and respond positively, sometimes extravagantly, to a visitor eager for more; that the information degrades further when the interest in finding the ucumar is explicit and a local guide is being paid; and — the sentence that ought to end the debate about eyewitness inventories — that in their own more neutral wildlife interviews across the region, reports of monkeys, tapir, jaguar and puma proved useful and checkable in the field, "pero en nuestra experiencia el ucumar nunca fue mencionado como un animal silvestre que la gente reconociera." The 1901 file is the cleanest control case the subject has, because it is the one occasion when somebody went and looked. Caras y Caretas reported a creature and a police capture in the same paragraph, and the creature turned out to be Pedro Ocampo, a man who had taken to living in the forest after leaving prison. The magazine did not need to debunk anything: the identification arrived with the story. The most publicised modern episode, in April 2022, is a single-witness account: Ángel Armando Pacheco, a 52-year-old former boxer, told the Salta daily El Tribuno that at Pasteadero Chico near Metán his dogs turned back, and "cuando alumbré hacia adelante quedé completamente aterrado porque ahí estaba esa cosa, era como un gorila grande, peludo y color oscuro", robust, slow-moving, about 1.70 m tall, with red eyes, seen at roughly 25 metres by torchlight. It is a report: there is no photograph of the animal, no cast, no hair, no scat, no genetic work — and none, as of this writing in August 2026, has been published for any Argentine ucumar claim. A last fact concerns the name rather than the animal. A witness who reaches for the word ucumar has already said "bear" in Quechua before describing anything, and — in the form Sanderson recorded, ukumar-zupai — has also said "devil", since the 1586 Lima vocabulary glosses "Diablo" as çupay. The name arrives with the category already attached.

Can you visit Ucumar?

There is an Ucumar on the map, and its position comes from specimen labels rather than from a brochure. El Ucumar is a paraje in the Departamento La Caldera, Salta, on National Route 9, the camino de cornisa that climbs from Salta city to Jujuy. Job Kuijt's 2003 monograph of Phoradendron records collections made at "Depto. La Caldera, El Ucumar, road to Jujuy, Ruta 9, Km 1642-1646", which fixes it to a four-kilometre stretch of the cornisa by its own kilometre posts. The municipal tourism site of La Caldera keeps a page for it under the camino de cornisa; consulted on 22 September 2026, the page's fields were empty — the check-in and check-out boxes read "0pm" and "0am", the address, services, activities and accessibility headings had nothing under them, and the only filled line was "Abierto todo el año". No timetable for the paraje can be taken from it. Parque Nacional Calilegua, in Jujuy, is the yungas park the coordinate on this file falls inside. That was tested rather than assumed: the point, 23.6091 S and 64.8181 W, sits within the park's OpenStreetMap boundary, about 4.2 km from the nearest vertex of it, and some 22.6 km north-north-west of Libertador General San Martín. The national parks administration published its hours on 22 September 2026 as 8.30 to 18.30 from 1 April to 30 November and 8.00 to 19.30 from 1 December to 31 March, with the window for excursions narrower than the gate: 8.00 to 18.00 in winter, 8.00 to 17.00 in summer. Access is from Libertador General San Martín, given as 112 km from the city of San Salvador de Jujuy by RN 34. Past the bridge over the río San Lorenzo, RP 83 begins — described by the administration as a "camino de cornisa de ripio consolidado" — and runs 23 km through the park, the entrance roughly 8 km in. One bus a day towards San Francisco and Valle Grande leaves the Libertador terminal at 8.00, the administration's page calling it the "horario único", and crosses the park; the stop to request is Aguas Negras. The park holds more than 76,000 hectares of cloud forest and very little infrastructure. Metán and Rosario de la Frontera, in Salta, are ordinary working towns on the RN 9 and RN 34 corridor, with hotels and bus links and nothing built around the legend. The 2022 accounts published in El Tribuno came from Pasteadero Chico, in rural Metán, and the farmland involved is private property. The last caution here belongs to the biologists. Rumiz and his co-authors, reviewing the Argentine ucumar reports in 2012, record that the reports multiply where a visitor's interest is explicit and a local guide is being paid.

Sources consulted

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

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Ucumar

Where and when was Ucumar sighted?

What is Ucumar?

What is the history of Ucumar?

Timeline: the documented record of Ucumar

Is there a rational explanation for Ucumar?

Can you visit Ucumar?

Sources consulted

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Ucumar

Where and when was Ucumar sighted?

What is Ucumar?

What is the history of Ucumar?

Timeline: the documented record of Ucumar

Is there a rational explanation for Ucumar?

Can you visit Ucumar?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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