📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº0270 ACTIVE

La Ciguapa

La Ciguapa is a legend from Cordillera Central, DO — 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 La Ciguapa come from?

Location: Cordillera Central, DO
Kind of legend: Creature legend
Coordinates: 19.0, -70.667
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is the legend of 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. 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 dictionaries record the creature only from 1941. 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. (The manuscript was only rediscovered in Havana in 1836, and its authenticity has been argued over ever since; the date is the poem's, not a surviving 1608 printing.) In 1836 Esteban Pichardo's Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas registers siguapa as a bird — the stygian owl, Asio stygius — and his 1862 edition adds a rosaceous plant. The Real Academia's Diccionario histórico de la lengua española lays these datings out under the entry "ciguapa o siguapa" and calls the etymology uncertain; Francisco Santamaría's proposal, Nahuatl chicuatli 'owl' plus papauia 'to shriek', is offered there as a conjecture and nothing more. 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. Ten years, and nobody has settled it. 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 of Samaná, the long-haired people of the island's north-east, which is the origin of the etymology repeated ever since. Fray Cipriano de Utrera, a Spanish priest who reached Santo Domingo in 1910, said he first heard of the ciguapa in 1911, and compared her to the hairy wild folk that Bishop Alessandro Geraldini had described in his Itinerarium ad regiones sub aequinoctiali plaga constitutas, written before his death in 1524 and printed in Rome in 1631. 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 1941 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, and that reprint, not the newspaper, is the link through which nearly everybody has read Angulo Guridi since. 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 argued in Small Axe that the whole thing is fakelore: an invented myth presenting itself as tradition.

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, hairy 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, historicising the figure against anti-Haitianism, negrophobia, misogyny and homophobia, and arguing that what Angulo Guridi introduced is fakelore: an invented myth presenting itself as tradition.

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, and none in the chroniclers who followed. The Taíno claim rests entirely on the resemblance between the word and the name of the Ciguayos, which is a resemblance, not a document. The word's own record runs the other way. In the Real Academia's historical dictionary the senses appear in this order: a sapotaceous tree, 1608; an owl, 1836; a rosaceous plant, 1862; the mythological woman with inverted feet, 1941; and, in Cuba, a clandestine prostitute, 1942. The supernatural sense is the last to arrive and the only one that is exclusively Dominican, and its first dictionary record is Patín Maceo's, seventy-five years after Angulo Guridi and six 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, so a control is worth running on the nearest relative. 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 is a reason to date the ciguapa's feet late, not a proof that no one had said it earlier. The hunting recipe is not a rule but a set of incompatible variants, and it is worth saying so instead of picking one. Bosch requires a perro cinqueño, a five-toed dog, and mentions no moon. Popular versions add a full moon and make the dog white speckled with black; others make it a six-toed polydactyl, or a jíbaro, a feral dog; the Spanish Wikipedia article has a white dog and a waxing moon. Nothing in the 1866 text mentions a dog at all. Anything stated here as the rule would be a choice among rumours. Two things we could not measure, and they matter. The 1866-versus-1876 dispute over the first printing cannot be closed without the issues of El Tiempo themselves, which we have not been able to consult. And Manuel J. Andrade's Folk-lore from the Dominican Republic (American Folklore Society, 1930), the scientific corpus of Dominican oral tradition and the base on which Terrence Hansen built his 1957 type index, could only be checked here in its table of contents: no ciguapa appears among the titles of its 304 tales, while the control term "bruja" appears in several of them. That is a real absence in a real index, but it is the absence of a tale, not of a belief, and Andrade's section of beliefs was beyond reach — the Internet Archive, HathiTrust and the University of Michigan copies were all unreachable from here on 16 August 2026. Say the honest thing: between 1498 and 1866 nobody wrote her down, and between 1866 and 1935 nobody wrote down her feet.

Can you visit La Ciguapa?

There is nothing to visit. The ciguapa has no cave, no shrine and no festival of her own, and the pin on our map marks the Dominican Republic as a convention, not a place where anything happens. The only spot a source actually names is the ford of the Bajabonico river, on the old road from Santiago de los Caballeros to Puerto Plata, where Angulo Guridi set his narrator in 1866; we have no sourced coordinate for it and have not moved the pin. What can be visited are the documents, and most of them are free. The Real Academia Española's Diccionario histórico de la lengua española is open at rae.es and its entry "ciguapa o siguapa" is the quickest way to see the whole datable history of the word in one screen. Balboa's Espejo de paciencia is public domain and circulates as a PDF; the stanza with the siguapas is the one where the hamadryads come down from the trees. Anchieta's letter of 1560 is published in full, in Portuguese and with a scholarly apparatus, as number 7 of the Cadernos da Reserva da Biosfera da Mata Atlântica, and it is a free download. Angulo Guridi's novelette circulates in online transcriptions and 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. Candelario's article is the one that costs money: Small Axe is behind Duke University Press's paywall. For anyone who wants to settle the date, the place is Santo Domingo. The Archivo General de la Nación, at Calle General Modesto Díaz 2, Zona Universitaria, holds the nineteenth-century Dominican press and runs the free Biblioteca Digital Dominicana, with more than sixteen thousand Dominican books online. Its site does not publish reading-room hours, so write before travelling, and be warned that we have not been able to confirm that the 1866 or the February 1876 issues of El Tiempo survive there at all. That single check — which issue carries the story — would close a ten-year gap that has been open since at least 1989.

Sources consulted

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

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas