📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº0270 ACTIVE

La Ciguapa

Everyone in the Dominican Republic can describe the ciguapa: a small woman of the mountains, naked under hair that falls to her calves, who comes out at night, lures lone men into the bush and leaves footprints pointing the wrong way, because her feet are on backwards.

Where does the legend of La Ciguapa come from?

Location: Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic
Kind of legend: Creature legend
Coordinates: 19.0, -70.667
Last updated: 2026-10-04

LOCATION

What is the legend of La Ciguapa?

Almost none of that is in the story that first put her in print. In 1866 Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi published a novelette called La ciguapa in El Tiempo, the Santiago paper he ran, and there she belongs to a shy mountain people, male and female, a vara tall, golden-skinned, sleeping in the crowns of cedars and living on fish, with no language but a howl — and no feet worth mentioning. She seduces nobody: a girl of fifteen sees one by the Bajabonico river, faints, and dies three days later. The backward feet and the five-toed dog needed to catch her are Juan Bosch's, written in 1935; the first dictionary to record the creature is Manuel A. Patín Maceo's, in the early 1940s. Before that, in Cuba, a siguapa was a tree, and then an owl.

What is the history of La Ciguapa?

The ciguapa is always introduced as something older than the Dominican Republic. Her documented life is shorter than that, and it can be laid out link by link, because almost every link is a printed page with a date on it. The word comes first, and at first it does not mean a woman. The oldest text in which it has been traced is Espejo de paciencia, the Cuban epic poem written by Silvestre de Balboa in 1608, where the hamadryads come down from the trees carrying "frutas de siguapas y macaguas" — a fruit, in a stanza whose other names are mameyes, pineapples, prickly pears and avocados. (1608 is the date the poem gives itself; the text is known from a manuscript rediscovered in Havana in 1836, and its authenticity has been argued over ever since.) In 1836 Esteban Pichardo's Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas registers siguapa as a bird — the stygian owl, Asio stygius. Under "ciguapa", the Real Academia's Diccionario histórico de la lengua española records the etymology Francisco J. Santamaría put forward in 1942, after a theory of Marcos E. Becerra: Nahuatl chicuatli 'owl' plus papauia 'to shriek'. The creature arrives in 1866. Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi (Santo Domingo, 1816 – San Pedro de Macorís, 1884), who had spent most of his life in Cuba and who directed the Santiago paper El Tiempo, published in it a novelette called "La ciguapa". Even that date is contested: Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi gives 1866, while Manuel Mora Serrano reported that, according to a note by the professor Francisco Batista García, the file of the historian Vetilio Alfau Durán records the story appearing in issues 15 and 22 of El Tiempo in February 1876. The story itself sets the traveller's ride on 4 June 1860, which fits either date. What that story says is not what the legend says now. A traveller riding from Santiago de los Caballeros to Puerto Plata stops at the Bajabonico river and meets a grieving young man, Jacinto, who tells him that since before the Discovery there has lived in the island "una raza cuya residencia ha sido siempre el corazón de estas montañas" — a race whose home has always been the heart of these mountains. Its members stand one vara tall; they have "la piel dorada del verdadero indio, los ojos negros y rasgados", hair that falls to the calf, they sleep in the crowns of cedars and live on fish; they run like a hare and jump from branch to branch like a bird, and they have no language, only a howl. Jacinto's fifteen-year-old Marcelina sees one by the river, faints, loses her reason and dies three days later; they bury her under the wax tree where the two of them had just declared themselves. So the founding text has no backward feet, no deceiving footprints, no full moon, no dog, and no seduction of lone men — the creature kills a girl, by fright, and it is a people with males and females, which is why Dominican tradition also knows a ciguapo. It also makes no claim to Taíno ancestry: the race is simply older than 1492. Between that page and the twentieth century the figure is passed from hand to hand. In the 1890s the physician and historian Alejandro Llenas tied her to the Ciguayos, the long-haired people of the island's north-east — "este es sin duda el último recuerdo de los ciguayos" — which is the origin of the etymology repeated ever since. Fray Cipriano de Utrera, a Spanish priest who reached Santo Domingo in 1910, heard of the ciguapa in 1911. Writing in 1951, he said that everyone took her reversible feet for a fable, and set beside her the wild men "con todo el cuerpo cubierto de vellos largos" that Bishop Alessandro Geraldini had placed in the north of the island in his Itinerarium ad regiones sub aequinoctiali plaga constitutas, written before Geraldini's death in 1524. The feet arrive with Juan Bosch. In 1935, in the pieces gathered as Indios, the writer and future president wrote the sentence that made the modern ciguapa: "La Ciguapa es una diminuta mujer india, cuyos cabellos la visten. Tiene los pies al revés y sólo camina de noche. Mucha gente asegura haberla visto, mas siempre es difícil cogerla, porque para conseguir tal cosa es menester perseguirla con un perro cinqueño." Backward feet, night walking and the five-toed dog, in three lines and with a signature. The rest follows quickly. In the early 1940s Manuel A. Patín Maceo's "Americanismos en el lenguaje dominicano", in the Anales de la Universidad de Santo Domingo, gives the first dictionary entry for the mythological sense, feet already inverted. In 1946 the first issue of the Boletín del Folklore Dominicano carries an article on the ciguapas signed by Estrada Torres — the first time she is treated as folklore rather than as literature. In 1954 Miguel Ángel Monclús puts the inverted feet into his novel Cachón. In 1969 Rodríguez Demorizi reprints the 1866 text in Tradiciones y cuentos dominicanos; modern readings quote it from there, as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert does in 2017, from page 95. Mora Serrano lectured on her in 1973 and published "Indias, vien-vienes y ciguapas" in Eme Eme in 1975. In 2016 the sociologist Ginetta Candelario, in Small Axe, read the myth as a metaphor for the contradictions of Hispanic Caribbean history, and ciguapeo as a method taken up by queer, black-identified, anti-racist and feminist movements against the anti-Haitianism, negrophobia, misogyny and homophobia of the previous decade.

Timeline: the documented record of La Ciguapa

c. 1498 Ramón Pané compiles in Hispaniola the first ethnographic account written in the Americas. He records the opías, the dead who leave Coaybay at night, are known by their missing navels, take the shape of relatives and vanish from the arms of men who try to embrace them. There is no ciguapa in it, and none in the chroniclers who follow.
31 May 1560 José de Anchieta, writing from São Vicente to the general of his order, reports that the Indians speak of demons "a que os Brasis chamam corupira", which attack them in the forest, and that travellers leave feathers, fans and arrows as offerings on the mountain paths. It is the oldest record of the backward-footed forest being of the Americas — and it says nothing at all about feet.
1608 Silvestre de Balboa writes Espejo de paciencia in Cuba. Among the fruits the hamadryads bring down from the trees are "frutas de siguapas y macaguas". It is the oldest text in which the word has been traced, and it names a tree. The manuscript was only rediscovered in Havana in 1836 and its authenticity has been debated since.
1836 Esteban Pichardo's Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas registers siguapa as a bird: the stygian owl, Asio stygius. His 1862 edition adds a rosaceous plant. Neither edition knows any woman of that name.
1866 Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi publishes the novelette "La ciguapa" in El Tiempo, the Santiago de los Caballeros paper he directed. It is the first appearance of the creature in print. Her people are a vara tall, golden-skinned, with hair down to the calf, speechless but for a howl, sleeping in cedar crowns and living on fish; a girl of fifteen dies of fright after seeing one. Nothing is said about her feet.
February 1876 (disputed) Against Rodríguez Demorizi's 1866, Manuel Mora Serrano reports that the file of the historian Vetilio Alfau Durán — cited by the professor Francisco Batista García — records the story appearing in issues 15 and 22 of El Tiempo in February 1876. The two datings differ by ten years and neither has been settled from the newspaper itself.
1876 (Brazil) Couto de Magalhães publishes O selvagem, where the curupira is described as "um pequeno tapuio, com os pés voltados para trás" — the passage as we read it is quoted from the 1913 edition, p. 157, in the notes to Anchieta's letter, and we have not seen the 1876 first edition. Three centuries after Anchieta named the being, the backward feet enter the record: in the age of the folklorists, not in the sixteenth century.
1911 Fray Cipriano de Utrera, a Spanish priest who had arrived in Santo Domingo the previous year, says he first heard of the ciguapa. He compares her with the hairy wild people described by Bishop Alessandro Geraldini in his Itinerarium, written before 1524 and printed in Rome in 1631 — an analogy of his own, not an earlier attestation.
1935 Juan Bosch, in the pieces collected as Indios, writes: "La Ciguapa es una diminuta mujer india, cuyos cabellos la visten. Tiene los pies al revés y sólo camina de noche… es menester perseguirla con un perro cinqueño." Backward feet, night walking and the five-toed dog appear together, signed and dated, sixty-nine years after the founding text that has none of them.
1941 Manuel A. Patín Maceo's "Americanismos en el lenguaje dominicano", in the Anales de la Universidad de Santo Domingo, gives the first dictionary record of the mythological sense: a fantastic being in the shape of a woman, with inverted feet, who lives in the hills and comes down to the rivers to bewitch men. The Real Academia's historical dictionary still dates the sense from there.
1946 The first issue of the Boletín del Folklore Dominicano carries an article on the ciguapas signed by Estrada Torres — the first time she is handled as folklore rather than as literature, eighty years after Angulo Guridi. The two sources that mention the piece give the author different first names, so we cite only the surname.
1969 Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi reprints the 1866 text in Tradiciones y cuentos dominicanos (Colección Pensamiento Dominicano 42). The description sits on page 95. From here on it is this reprint, not the newspaper, that nearly everyone has read — the intermediate link through which the founding text reaches the modern retellings that contradict it.
November 2016 The sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario publishes "La ciguapa y el ciguapeo: Dominican Myth, Metaphor, and Method" in Small Axe, reading the myth as a metaphor for the contradictory coherence of Hispanic Caribbean history and society, and ciguapeo as a method taken up by queer, black-identified, anti-racist and feminist movements against a decade of anti-Haitianism, negrophobia, misogyny and homophobia.

Is there a rational explanation for La Ciguapa?

The ciguapa is not attested in any Taíno source. Ramón Pané, the friar Columbus left behind to write down what the islanders believed, compiled his Relación around 1498 and recorded the opías — the dead, recognisable by their missing navels, who came out at night, took the shape of relatives and vanished from the arms of men who tried to lie with them. There is no ciguapa in it. Manuel Mora Serrano, lecturing on the figure in 1989, reported that José Juan Arrom had told the folklorist Arístides Estrada Torres that the word is not Taíno, and added that no Taíno idol, figurine or carving shows such a being. The Taíno attribution rests on the likeness between the word and the name of the Ciguayos, the long-haired people of the north-east to whom Alejandro Llenas tied her in the 1890s. The word's own record starts somewhere else: in Silvestre de Balboa's Espejo de paciencia, dated 1608, siguapa is a fruit tree; in Esteban Pichardo's Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas of 1836 it is a bird, the stygian owl. The woman arrives in 1866 with Angulo Guridi's story, and she reaches a dictionary only with Manuel A. Patín Maceo's Americanismos en el lenguaje dominicano, some seventy-five years after Angulo Guridi and a few years after Bosch. The backward feet can be bracketed between two dates. They are absent from the 1866 story, which describes the creature's body in detail — height, skin, eyes, hair, gait — and never mentions its feet; they are present, as a defining trait, in Bosch's sentence of 1935. Mora Serrano put it plainly at a colloquium on 28 October 1989: "lo de los pies volteados no parece ser de mucho tiempo, porque en Angulo Guridi no lo registra". The obvious objection is that print lags behind speech, and the nearest relative offers a control. The Brazilian curupira is the standard comparison, and it has a genuine sixteenth-century pedigree: José de Anchieta, writing to his superior from São Vicente on the last day of May 1560, reports that "há certos demonios, a que os Brasis chamam corupira, que acometem aos Indios muitas vezes no mato", and that travellers leave feathers, fans and arrows on the mountain paths as an offering. He describes what it does; he says nothing whatever about its feet. The backward feet of the curupira turn up in the nineteenth-century folklore literature — Couto de Magalhães, O selvagem, describing it as "um pequeno tapuio, com os pés voltados para trás" — which is to say that even the sibling with a 1560 certificate acquires its inverted feet three centuries later, in the age of the folklorists. That makes a late date for the ciguapa's feet likely; it does not prove that nobody spoke of them earlier. The hunting recipe comes in variants that do not agree. Bosch requires a perro cinqueño, a five-toed dog, and mentions no moon. The versions collected by Gabriel Atiles Bidó and retold in the Centro Virtual Cervantes in 2006 add a full moon and make the dog black and white; the Spanish Wikipedia article has a white dog and a waxing moon. The 1866 text has no dog at all. Anything stated here as the rule would be a choice among rumours. The first printing is still in dispute: Rodríguez Demorizi gives 1866; the file of the historian Vetilio Alfau Durán, as cited by Mora Serrano, gives issues 15 and 22 of El Tiempo for February 1876; and the story itself sets the traveller's ride on 4 June 1860, which fits either. Nor does she appear in Manuel J. Andrade's Folk-lore from the Dominican Republic (American Folklore Society, 1930), which collects 304 tales, a body of riddles and a section on beliefs and customs — birth, baptism, wakes, prayers, remedies, omens, witchcraft and vodou. In the full text of the University of Michigan copy on the Internet Archive, searched on 4 October 2026, the word ciguapa (or siguapa) does not occur anywhere in the volume, while the control word "bruja" occurs 58 times. On the record cited here, the creature first appears in print in 1866, and her backward feet in 1935.

Can you visit La Ciguapa?

The ciguapa belongs to oral tradition and to print, and the one place her founding story names is a river. The pin on this file, at 19.0, -70.6667, is a rounded point in the Cordillera Central, in the municipality of Constanza, La Vega province, about 7.6 km north-north-east of the town of Tireo; it stands for the mountains in general, since Angulo Guridi's novelette places the ciguapas in "el corazón de estas montañas" without naming a range. The river is the Bajabonico, where his traveller, riding from Santiago de los Caballeros to Puerto Plata, stops and meets Jacinto. It runs through Puerto Plata province on the north side of the island, and its whole course as mapped in OpenStreetMap lies at least 69 km north of the pin. The documents can be read online, most of them free. The Real Academia Española publishes its Diccionario histórico de la lengua española at rae.es, and the entry "ciguapa o siguapa" sets out the whole datable history of the word on one screen. Balboa's Espejo de paciencia circulates as a public-domain PDF from the Biblioteca Antológica; the siguapas are in the stanza that begins "Bajaron de los arboles en naguas / Las bellas hamadriades hermosas". Anchieta's letter of 1560, the control for the curupira, is number 7 of the Cadernos da Reserva da Biosfera da Mata Atlântica, a free PDF with the full Portuguese text and editorial notes. Angulo Guridi's story is reprinted in Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Tradiciones y cuentos dominicanos (Colección Pensamiento Dominicano 42, Santo Domingo, Julio D. Postigo e Hijos, 1969), where the description sits on page 95, and it circulates in online transcriptions of that reprint. Candelario's article is the one that costs money: Small Axe is behind Duke University Press's paywall. The question still open is the date of first printing: 1866 according to Rodríguez Demorizi, or issues 15 and 22 of El Tiempo in February 1876 according to the note Mora Serrano reported in 1989. The issues themselves would settle it. The Archivo General de la Nación is at Calle General Modesto Díaz 2, Zona Universitaria, Santo Domingo, telephone 809-362-1111. The frequently-asked-questions page of its website, in the copy archived by the Wayback Machine on 1 May 2026, gives its service hours as Monday to Friday, 8 am to 3 pm, all year, and says documents are requested in the Sala de Atención a Usuarios on showing an identity document. A report of 9 August 2025 in AplatanaoNews credits its Hemeroteca-Biblioteca with about 840 newspaper titles, and its Biblioteca Digital Dominicana with more than 17,000 titles online.

Sources consulted

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

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas