📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº0270 ACTIVE

El Pombero

El Pombero is a legend from Región guaraní, Asunción, PY — a folk story passed down over generations. This file collects its origins, its meaning and how it has been retold.

Where does the legend of El Pombero come from?

Location: Región guaraní, Asunción, PY
Kind of legend: Creature legend
Coordinates: -25.264, -57.576
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is the legend of El Pombero?

The Pombero is the best known being in Paraguayan folklore — first in belief and first in reported sightings in a 2020 survey of 4,015 people — and the only one of them whose name can be traced to a documented job. In 1639 the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, writing against the slave raids on the missions, recorded the indigenous agents of the São Paulo slavers, "a quien en lengua Portuguessa llaman Pomberos, y en nuestro Castellano Palomeros": men who moved by night, knew the ground, dealt in hatchets and tobacco and carried off children. He adds that the same traffic employed pomberos in Angola. The being appears in print much later. The oldest field description we can read was collected in Corrientes and printed in 1917: a tall, thin man in an enormous straw hat, guardian of the birds at siesta time, who takes away boys who hunt them, whistles like a bird, must be spoken of quietly and is paid in tobacco left outside the door at night. Modern Paraguayan versions keep the hat and make him short, stocky and hairy. He is not an ancient Guaraní god; he is something stranger.

El Pombero, Región guaraní, Asunción, Paraguay — Museum figure labelled “POMBERO”, photographed in Paraguay in 2007. Which museum holds it could not be confirmed; it is a display piece, not a depiction drawn from tradition. Image: Patty P · Public domain

What is the history of El Pombero?

The Pombero has something almost no other being of its kind can offer: the first printed appearance of its name is dated, it can be read in the original, and it does not describe a spirit. It describes men. In 1639 the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya published in Madrid his 'Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay y Tape', written to be laid before the Spanish court as a denunciation of the slave raids on the missions. In the section on the reduction of Jesús María he explains how Father Cristóbal de Mendoza came to hear of certain Tupis "que son vanqueros, o caxeros de los vecinos de S. Pablo, a quien en lengua Portuguessa llaman Pomberos, y en nuestro Castellano Palomeros, a la similitud de los palomos diestros en recoger, y hurtar palomas de otros palomares: los naturales los llaman Mu, que quiere decir, los contratantes" (spelling as in the 1639 printing; the widely quoted 1892 reprint has 'banqueros o cajeros' and 'palomas en otros palomares'). They were indigenous agents working for the slavers of São Paulo. Montoya goes on: they divide the country between them, each keeping "su aduar, y mesa de cambio, para comprar Indios, mugeres, y niños", and the coastal towns of Brazil send them hatchets, machetes, knives, tools, old clothes, hats and "mil buxerías, para la compra de almas". Later in the same book the word returns as a simile for theft — "lo que los Pomberos, o palomos ladrones, que trae a su palomar el despojo" — and the index carries the entry "Muerte procuran dar los Indios Pomberos... a un Padre". Montoya also adds a line that almost nobody quotes: "estos Pomberos los ay también en Angola al tragín de negros". Montoya derived the word from 'pomba', dove — hence his Spanish gloss 'palomeros'. The linguist Germán de Granda, who studied the Spanish of Paraguay, considers that etymology wrong: the older etymon is Mpumbu, a place name of Bantu stock that named three trading districts in what is now Angola, and 'pombeiro' in Brazilian Portuguese means an agent sent to obtain slaves on a merchant's account. Montoya's own aside about Angola, written in 1639 with no etymological intent whatever, sits exactly where Granda's reading puts it. How the raider became the being of the woods is not documented step by step, and it should not be narrated as if it were. What can be dated is the oldest field description we have been able to read. It comes from Corrientes, it was communicated to the Argentine naturalist Juan B. Ambrosetti by the national surveyor Juan Queirel, and it was printed in the posthumous volume 'Supersticiones y leyendas' (Buenos Aires, 1917) — part of a folklore series Ambrosetti had begun publishing in 1893 in the 'Revista del Jardín Zoológico de Buenos Aires', out of notebooks he says had been filled some twenty-five years earlier. That Pombero is not the one we had. "El Pombero o Cuarahú-Yára es un hombre alto y delgado, que lleva un grandísimo sombrero de paja, y una caña en la mano": tall and thin, in an enormous straw hat, with a cane. He walks the woods at siesta time "cuidando de todos los pájaros, pues es su protector", and carries off boys caught hunting them — "de modo que las criaturas, por temor de él, no se alejan de los ranchos y sus padres pueden dormir tranquilamente la siesta". The legend has a job, and the job is childcare. In the Chaco, Ambrosetti adds, he is an invisible companion with whom a pact can be made, who will then keep his friend out of danger, and who may appear as an Indian, a log or a drifting camalote. He whistles like a bird; of him one must speak little and low; and at night one leaves tobacco outside the house. The modern Paraguayan version, as Dionisio González Torres tells it, keeps the hat and reverses the body: "un hombre, feo, más bien bajo, fornido, retacón, moreno, con manos y pies velludos", ragged, in a straw hat and with a bag over his shoulder. To him are left tobacco, honey and a bottle of caña, and to him are attributed the pregnancies of women who then bear a child in his likeness. The straw hat is the one feature that survives unchanged from a surveyor's notebook in Corrientes to a compilation printed in Asunción in 1998; the height flips. He is also, by every account since the 1920s, the most popular of them all. Eloy Fariña Núñez called him in 1926 "el más popular de los duendes guaraníes", and a century later a survey of 4,015 people put him first among twelve Paraguayan myths.

Timeline: the documented record of El Pombero

1629-1632 The bandeirante raids on the Guairá strip the region of its people: some 60,000 taken from the Jesuit reductions and the Spanish encomiendas in four years, on the figure Bartomeu Melià gives and Domingo Aguilera cites. The men who scouted ahead of those raids were the pomberos.
1639 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya prints the 'Conquista espiritual' in Madrid. Describing the reduction of Jesús María he records Tupi agents of the citizens of São Paulo "a quien en lengua Portuguessa llaman Pomberos, y en nuestro Castellano Palomeros", adds that the Guaraní themselves called them 'Mu', the traders, and notes that the same traffic employs pomberos in Angola. This is the oldest dated appearance of the word we have been able to read, and it names living men, not a spirit.
1889 Daniel Granada publishes the 'Vocabulario rioplatense razonado' in Montevideo. It has no entry for Pombero — the P sequence runs Poleo, Poncho, Popí, Porongo — but it does register 'bombero' as 'espía' and notes that the word had earlier meant the Indian scout. The absence proves little: the book carries no supernatural beings at all.
1893 Juan B. Ambrosetti begins publishing his 'Materiales para el estudio del folk-lore misionero' in the 'Revista del Jardín Zoológico de Buenos Aires' (vol. I, part V, pp. 129-160), the first instalment of the series in which the Pombero chapter would later appear. His travel notebooks, he writes, had been filled some twenty-five years before the 1917 reprint.
1917 'Supersticiones y leyendas' appears posthumously in Buenos Aires — Ambrosetti had died on 28 May of that year — with chapter V of its second part given to "El Pombero o Cuarahú-Yára (Dueño del Sol)". The description, credited to the national surveyor Juan Queirel and to Corrientes, is of a tall, thin man in an enormous straw hat with a cane, protector of the birds at siesta time, an invisible companion in the Chaco with whom pacts are made, paid in tobacco left outside the house at night. Ambrosetti files him among the "fantasmas de la selva misionera" and calls him a modification of the Jasy Jateré.
1926 The Paraguayan writer Eloy Fariña Núñez publishes 'Conceptos estéticos (Mitos guaraníes)' in Buenos Aires and calls the Pombero "el más popular de los duendes guaraníes". We have not been able to open the book itself: the phrase is given here from Paulo de Carvalho Neto's citation of it, and should be read as second-hand.
1948 Alfred Métraux publishes 'The Guaraní' in volume 3 of the Handbook of South American Indians. In 28 pages on Guaraní religion, shamanism and mythology the Pombero is not mentioned once, while the belief in "masters or protectors of animals, plants, trees, water places, and winds" is recorded in full. The function is indigenous; the name is not.
1961 Paulo de Carvalho Neto publishes 'Folklore del Paraguay. Sistemática analítica', the first study of the subject done to academic standards. It counts 24 mythological figures current in Paraguay, heads the list with the Pombero and gives him pages 91-98, describing "un hombre petiso, lleno de pelos" with invisibility, ubiquity, camouflage, intangibility and levitation — and it complains, repeatedly, of plagiarism and literary invention among the earlier compilers.
1998 Francisco Pérez-Maricevich's compilation 'Mitos y leyendas del Paraguay' (Asunción, El Lector) prints Dionisio González Torres's version of "El mito del Pombero o de Karaí-Pyharé": short, stocky, dark, with hairy hands and feet, ragged, in a straw hat and with a bag over the shoulder, paid in tobacco, honey and a bottle of caña, and blamed for pregnancies. The hat is Ambrosetti's; the height is the opposite of Ambrosetti's.
14 August - 30 September 2020 The Fundación Tapé Avirú runs the 'Primer sondeo sobre personajes mitológicos del Paraguay' online. 4,015 people from all seventeen departments and Asunción answer four questions about twelve beings. Published by Domingo A. Aguilera Jiménez in 2023: 63.9 per cent believe in one or more, 48.7 per cent claim to have seen or felt one, and the Pombero comes first both in belief and in reported experience.

Is there a rational explanation for El Pombero?

There is nothing here to debunk in the usual sense: nobody has ever offered a photograph, a footprint or a specimen of the Pombero. What can be tested is the claim this entry used to make in passing — that he is an ancient Guaraní nature spirit — and that claim can be measured rather than asserted. He is not attested in the ethnography of the Guaraní proper. Alfred Métraux's synthesis 'The Guaraní', in volume 3 of the Handbook of South American Indians (1948), runs to 28 pages and roughly 12,400 words covering the religion, shamanism and mythology of the Apapocúva, Mbyá, Pañ and Kaingwá. The word Pombero appears in it zero times. Control terms in the same file, counted the same day: 'forest' 8, 'spirit' 5, and the sections on religion and mythology are present and complete. What Métraux does report, following Nimuendajú, is precisely the complex the Pombero is usually taken for: the Kaingwá "feel themselves surrounded by spirits or demons, who appear in human or animal forms. They are the masters or the protectors of animals, plants, trees, water places, and winds. These genii, if offended, can be harmful." The idea of an owner of the wild is old, documented and indigenous. The name fastened to it is neither. That name is Portuguese and it is a job. This is not a modern deduction: it is what the 1639 text says of itself, in Spanish, while the men it names were still alive. A second check produced a cleaner-looking result than it deserves, and it is worth writing down. Daniel Granada's 'Vocabulario rioplatense razonado' (Montevideo, 1889) has no entry for Pombero: read in order, its P sequence runs Poleo, Poncho, Popí, Porongo, Pororó, Poroto, Poste. It does have Bombero, "Explorador del campo enemigo. Espía", with the note "Antiguamente llamaban bombero al indio espía ó explorador; hoy se usa el vocablo en sentido lato". But the positive controls fail: lobizón, curupí and caipora also return zero in that book, because it is a lexicon of River Plate Spanish and not a repertory of supernatural beings. The absence measures the book's scope, not the belief's. We record it as a negative result that carries no weight. The physical description is the least stable part of the whole business, and our own version had borrowed a feature from a neighbour. The backward-turned feet we attributed to the Pombero belong, in the standard regional folklore literature, to the Kurupi: Paulo de Carvalho Neto describes that being as "un duende petiso, feo, bronceado, con ojos negros y melena, pies al revés, desnudo y con un miembro desproporcionado". And the straw hat and cane that Ambrosetti's informant gave the Pombero in the 1890s are, in the same repertory, the Jasy Jateré's costume; Ambrosetti said as much himself, filing the Pombero as "una modificación" of the Jasy Jateré. Traits migrate between these three beings, and any confident anatomy of the Pombero is a modern editorial decision, not a finding. The honest chronological statement is a narrow one. The word is documented from 1639, for men. The being is documented at least from the 1890s in Corrientes and from the 1920s as the best known figure in Paraguayan folklore. The step from one to the other is argued — by Carvalho Neto in 1961 and by Domingo Aguilera in 2023, who both point out that the night prowling, the concealment, the pacts and the taking of children are the raiders' own habits — but no document has been produced showing the transfer happening, and we have not found one either. What is not in doubt is that the belief is alive. In the online survey run by the Fundación Tapé Avirú between 14 August and 30 September 2020, answered by 4,015 people from all seventeen Paraguayan departments plus Asunción, 63.9 per cent said they believed in one or more of twelve mythological beings and 48.7 per cent said they had seen or felt one. Broken down by figure, the Pombero came first both in the number who believe and in the number who report a first-hand experience. Whatever else he is, he is not a museum piece.

Can you visit El Pombero?

There is no place to visit, and no place where the story is set. The Pombero belongs to the countryside at large — Paraguay, the Argentine provinces of Corrientes, Misiones and Formosa, and the adjoining parts of Brazil — and the pin on our map marks Asunción as a convention, not a spot where anything happened. The nearest thing to a physical stop is the Museo Mitológico Ramón Elías, at kilometre 19 of Ruta PY02 Mcal. Estigarribia, in Capiatá, about twenty kilometres east of Asunción on the road to Ciudad del Este and reachable by any of the frequent buses along that route. It is a private museum, founded by the sculptor and collector Ramón Elías and run today by his daughter Elsa Elías, who gives the guided tours herself; there is an admission charge and a telephone for booking, 0983 152428. The opening hours published by the Asunción daily ABC Color on 2 January 2024 were Tuesday to Saturday 09:00-12:00 and 15:00-17:00, Sundays and public holidays 09:00-12:00. One warning: the mythology room is built around Narciso R. Colmán's canon of the seven children of Tau and Kerana, and the thirteen figures the newspaper names — Teju Jagua, Mbói Tu'ĩ, Moñái, Jasy Jateré, Kurupi, Ao Ao, Luisõ, Kuarahy Ra'y, Pajé, Malavisión, Mbói Jagua, Yagua Ru and Plata Yvyguy — do not include the Pombero. If he is what you are going for, telephone first, and confirm hours and prices while you are at it. The documents, by contrast, are free and immediate. Montoya's 'Conquista espiritual' of 1639 is online as a complete scan of the Madrid edition at the Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú; Ambrosetti's 'Supersticiones y leyendas' is a free PDF on Wikimedia Commons, with the Pombero in chapter V of its second part; Métraux's 1948 Guaraní chapter is on the Nimuendajú library too; and Domingo Aguilera's 2023 article, with the full survey results, is open access at SciELO Argentina. Paulo de Carvalho Neto's 'Folklore del Paraguay' (1961), which remains the systematic study of these figures, is out of print and we have not been able to consult a copy. One courtesy, offered as report and not as instruction. In rural Paraguay and Corrientes the Pombero is not a joke, and the two things the tradition warns against are exactly the two a visitor is likeliest to do: whistling at night, and talking loudly about him. Tobacco left on a fence post is the customary politeness. Anyone who tells you their own story about him is doing you a kindness; take it as one.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-16 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas