La Patasola

In the mountains and forests of Tolima and the Colombian coffee country, people speak of the Patasola, a being with a single leg. Almost everything the internet says about her turns out to be recent. The oldest text that can still be read is chapter I of Tomás Carrasquilla's novel La marquesa de Yolombó, serialised from 1926, and there the Patasola is masculine, has no seduction and no biography, smashes fruit trees, fences and roofs with a cloven hoof, and — Carrasquilla's last word on him — nothing works against him. A Manizales newspaper used her in 1931 to mock Liberal night patrols in the coffee town of Fresno; a Pasto magazine put her among the beings that come out at nightfall in the Tolima of 1938. The famous origin story, the unfaithful wife killed by her husband, cannot be traced back beyond late compilations and encyclopaedia articles, which tell it in three incompatible ways. What does have a long life is smaller: the eye-curse she casts, the crickets she puts in your ears, and a protective prayer that nobody manages to finish.

Start with the word, because the word is older and plainer than the monster. In rural Colombian Spanish patasola means hopping on one foot. Célico Caycedo's Juegos y diversiones, a booklet printed in Bogotá by Acción Cultural Popular for country schools and radio schools, uses it that way throughout: in the hopscotch game el avión the player "salta al cuadro 2 y al 3 en patasola o pata de gallo (levantando un pie)", and among the forfeits at the end of the book is "andar en patacoja o patasola o pategallo". That is worth knowing before any search: half the printed hits for the name are children hopping, and one of them will look like a discovery. The oldest text I have been able to read that uses the name for a being is chapter I of Tomás Carrasquilla's La marquesa de Yolombó, which the Medellín paper Colombia began serialising in 1926. It contains a surprise. Carrasquilla's Patasola is not a woman. It is masculine, and it is not seductive at all: "Aquí habita el Patasola, que, disparándose del monte, en tres zancadas, desgaja los frutales, rompe cercos, hunde techos y cuanto topa, con su única pezuña, hendida como la de un marrano babilónico. No se conoce contra que le valga." No beauty, no adultery, no blood. A hoofed thing that smashes fruit trees, fences and roofs — and, in the last sentence, nothing works against it. That sentence matters, because it is the one the legend later loses. The passage sits inside a catalogue of the spirits of an eighteenth-century Antioquian mining camp — los ilusiones, the Patasola, the Madremonte, the Patetarro (a giant with one leg of flesh and a length of guadua cane for the other) and the invisible Bracamonte — and Carrasquilla explicitly says where he thinks they came from: "Los terribles genios del África no dejan en paz a los negros, arrancados de su suelo por los civilizados, cazadores de hombres. Con los barcos negreros han atravesado el Atlántico Océano… a oír sus nombres traducidos al castellano, a mezclarse con las deidades indígenas." Whatever one makes of that as ethnography, it is not the story the modern fiche tells. The next dated appearances I could find are journalistic, and both come from sweeping the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango's digitised historical press. On 14 September 1931 the Conservative daily La Patria, of Manizales, printed a "Crónica del Fresno" — Fresno is a coffee town in northern Tolima — datelined 6 September and signed only "Corresponsal". Its list of subheads includes "Los espantos de la patasola". The correspondent has been investigating why local Liberals were patrolling the streets at night armed with shotguns and peinillas during the electoral registration, and offers his explanation: they have seen "la PATASOLA que sube por el camino de La Sierra", who takes chocolate at one house, dines at another, walks down the butchers' street and goes to sleep at a Liberal leader's house; "es fama que la Patasola pasea la población a altas horas de la noche", and the armed men are her "guardia de honor". It is a joke, and that is exactly what makes it evidence: in 1931 you could build a partisan gag on the Patasola in a Caldas newspaper and expect every reader in the coffee belt to get it without a word of explanation. Seven years later she turns up in a magazine at the other end of the country. In Idearium, a monthly published in Pasto, number 8 of 1 January 1938 carries Cesáreo Rocha Castilla's essay "El San Juan en el Tolima" (pp. 367-375), a long, affectionate description of the June festivities of the Tolima plain — La Chamba, Coyaima, the Saldaña, Chenche, Yaguará. Night falls on the cockfight and the horsemen, and Rocha Castilla runs through the beings that come out with it: "sale de un bosquecillo la madremonte, y en el peñón está el poira, y trisca por las lomas la patasola, y vuela bajito la candileja, y sale mandingas a hacer diabluras". Trisca — she frisks, she gambols. She is one item in a nocturnal roll-call, with no biography and no crime. Then comes a hole, and the hole is the best thing in the file. In 1942 Colombia's Ministry of Education ran a national folklore survey, the Encuesta Folclórica Nacional, and asked schoolteachers to write down what their towns believed; 286 returns survive, and the Patronato Colombiano de Artes y Ciencias has digitised a set of them, eight from Tolima. Two are from Honda, on the Magdalena. The Centro de Estudios Pedagógicos return, sent on 19 October 1942 by Salomón Rengifo Reina and signed by fifteen teachers, has a section headed "BRUJERÍA Y ADIVINACIÓN" that lists a dozen omens — the hummingbird that announces a visit, the black butterfly that announces a death, the ring on a thread that sexes an unborn child — and says flatly: "La superstición poco se conoce, y aunque se nombran muchos agüeros en realidad la mayoría de la gente no los toma en serio." No Patasola, no Madremonte, no Mohán. The second Honda return, from the travelling schools, is blunter still: under the same heading a teacher typed four words, "No exite ninguna superstición", and somebody reading the file in Bogotá wrote in the margin, in pencil, "¡Qué raro!" The biography — the adulteress, the axe, the blood — is the part I cannot push back. The oldest version I have read with a date on it is Alexander Prieto Osorno's article for Rinconete, the Instituto Cervantes' online magazine, on 25 October 2005, and it gives two mutually exclusive origins: a beautiful, "extremadamente perversa" woman whose leg the community cuts off with an axe, and a daughter who curses her mother while chopping firewood until "el Diablo le tuerce el hacha" and she cuts off her own leg. In neither is there a husband. The husband arrives with the Spanish Wikipedia article, where he kills his wife's employer and takes off her leg with a machete; the English article lists three origins and attaches the axe to the second, not to the wife. Our own previous text had a husband and an axe, a combination that appears in none of them. What does have a continuous documentary life is smaller and stranger: the ojeo. Prieto Osorno prints the protective prayer — "Yo, como si, / pero como ya se ve… / Patasola, no hagas mal / que en el monte está tu bien" — and adds that fear has always stopped the victims finishing it. The same complex survives in fieldwork: a 2024 study of Ibagué's legends by Néstor Guarnizo Sánchez and colleagues, in the journal Modulema, describes a blonde one-legged woman who "se desplaza rápidamente con un vuelo de bruja", is used by farmers to frighten children into behaving, and can "retorcer sus ojos o introducir grillos en sus oídos"; the defence is "la oración del monte", which, they note, people forget precisely when they need it. Crickets in the ears and a prayer nobody can finish are odd things to invent twice. And she is still on the street. Every June the Festival Folclórico Colombiano in Ibagué closes the San Juan festivities with a parade whose monumental floats carry the region's beings — the Mohán, the Patasola, the Madremonte, the Llorona, the Tunjos. Rocha Castilla listed almost the same cast, for the same festival, in 1938.

There is no site to visit: the Patasola is a belief, not a place, and our map pin is a convention — the centre of Ibagué, capital of Tolima, the department most often named as her ground. The monte where she is said to walk is working farmland and forest in private hands, and there is no marker, museum or trail anywhere. The one thing you can actually attend is in Ibagué every June. The Festival Folclórico Colombiano, which in 2026 runs its 52nd edition across the whole month, closes the feast of San Juan on 24 June with a parade of monumental floats given over to the region's beings — the Mohán, the Patasola, the Madremonte, the Llorona, the Tunjos — followed by the San Pedro parade on 28 June. It is free, it is on the street, and it is the same festival that Cesáreo Rocha Castilla was describing in 1938 when he listed the Patasola among the things that come out at nightfall. Check the festival's own programme before booking: dates move by a day or two, and the parades start mid-morning. Everything else is archival, free and online, which for this fiche is the real itinerary. The Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango's Hemeroteca Digital Histórica has the 1931 La Patria and the 1938 Idearium in full, page images and searchable text; the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia publishes the complete text of La marquesa de Yolombó under a Creative Commons licence; and the Patronato Colombiano de Artes y Ciencias has put the surviving 1942 Encuesta Folclórica Nacional questionnaires online as PDFs, organised by department and municipality, with eight from Tolima. One warning about that last collection, because it cost me time: the questionnaires are scans without a text layer, so they cannot be searched — you have to read them page by page, and a good many are handwritten. If you are travelling in Tolima anyway, Fresno and Honda are both easy stops on the road between Manizales and the Magdalena, and both appear in the documents above: Fresno for the 1931 newspaper joke, Honda for the 1942 questionnaires and for the ministry official who wrote "¡Qué raro!" in the margin. Neither town commemorates any of this in any way.