La Sayona

On the Venezuelan plains they say the Sayona comes out at night to the man who is out carousing: a tall, beautiful, long-haired woman who invites him to follow her along a lonely road and then, when he draws near, shows him enormous fangs. That scene has been in print since April 1919, when Rómulo Gallegos put it in a short story; and in 1919 it had no biography attached — no name, no husband, no mother, no curse. The tale of the jealous woman arrives much later, and no two recorded versions agree on who died. The national heritage census carries four incompatible ones — in one she burns the hut with her son inside while the husband is in jail; in another it is God, not her mother, who condemns her — and none of the eight official entries we swept tells the story we used to tell. The name comes from the garment, the saya, and specialists of the llano treat the Sayona and the Llorona as one and the same. There is even a Sayona who was arrested: in Achaguas a local woman used to dress up as her during the nightly blackouts, until a group of young men worked it out.

La Sayona is told as though she came down from colonial times. What can actually be read with a date on it starts much later, and it does not start with her life story. It starts with her teeth. The dress came first. In his glossary of Venezuelan speech, Lisandro Alvarado (1858-1929) records the entry "SAYÓN. Saya" and credits it to Miguel Carmona's Diccionario indo-hispano, o venezolano-español (Caracas, 1858-1859): in mid-nineteenth-century Venezuela a sayón was a garment, not an executioner. A century and a half later the national heritage census still explains the name the same way — the apparition goes "dressed in a tunic or a long saya, hence her name" (entry "Sayona, leyenda", municipalities of Biruaca and Pedro Camejo, Apure). The oldest printed mention I have been able to read in full is from April 1919. It is a short story by Rómulo Gallegos, "Pegujal", published in the Caracas magazine Actualidades and signed at the foot "Caracas, April 1919". Describing the night of the plains he writes: "the disquieting night of the accursed lands […] in whose blackness there phosphoresce the frightful teeth of the sayona, who waits for the night-walker at the roadside and invites him to follow her." That is the whole of it in 1919: teeth, a road and an invitation. No name, no husband, no mother, no fire and no curse. Alvarado gave her an entry of her own soon afterwards and could not tell her life either: "La Sayona is a nocturnal vision feigned by popular imagination and legend, alongside others that survive in Venezuelan folklore." To document it he used two literary passages — the Gallegos line quoted above and another he abbreviates as "A. Carias, Jacinto", a work I have not managed to identify. Alvarado died on 10 April 1929 and that volume was not printed until 1955, in the Obras completas issued by the Ministry of Education. A lexicographer who wrote down everything he knew about a word knew that the Sayona frightened people at night; he did not know who she had been. The biography arrives late, and it arrives with proper names. The oldest complete telling I have been able to date sits in an official register: the entry "Sayona de las montañas y sabanas" in the First Census of Venezuelan Cultural Heritage, municipalities of Páez and Rómulo Gallegos, Apure. There the woman is called Casilda; her man, Severiano, is a carouser; and the neighbour who wants her has a nickname, Burro Tesero. Severiano accidentally kills a woman called la negra Timotea at a dance and the village constable takes him away to jail. With the husband gone, Burro Tesero tells Casilda that Severiano has been sleeping with her own mother. Next morning, when the mother arrives with the coffee she brings every day, Casilda sets fire to the hut with her son inside it and stabs her mother three times. The dying woman curses her: "You have taken my life, Casilda. You have taken my life, Sayona; you have taken the life of your own mother who brought you into the world. Cursed you shall be all your life! Without God and without Holy Mary you will walk the world looking for womanising men to ease your sins […] May God grant it be so." Then the fangs come through. Here is what our own earlier text had lost. We used to say she burned the house "with her husband inside". In the register the husband is in jail: the one who burns is the child. That is not decoration. It is the piece that links the Sayona to the Llorona, and specialists of the plains treat them as one figure. Edgar Colmenares del Valle — the philologist who edited the Diario de un llanero of Antonio José Torrealba, the guide who took Gallegos through Apure in 1927 — describes her in En el espejo de la memoria (Barinas, 2000, p. 61), quoted by Jenny González Muñoz, as "an evil woman with an apparently beautiful face but great fangs, who walks the streets of the plains towns before dawn, screaming and weeping with a dead child in her arms". By taking the child away, our summary had taken away the weeping. That long version does not belong to one town: the same text, almost word for word, is also registered in the municipality of Barinas, and there it carries details the Apure version lacks. The woman appears "with blonde hair", makes the man believe she lives alone so that he will walk her home, and once inside begins to undress while her body turns "into a skull with a toad's face"; she is "exceedingly afraid of the blessed palm cross and of prayers"; and "every man she frightens takes one sin off her". That last detail is what closes the curse: her mother condemned her to look for womanisers "to ease your sins", and here we are told how they are eased. And there is a third, shorter version, registered in three more Barinas municipalities — Obispos, the pair Cruz Paredes-Arismendi and the pair Rojas-Sosa: "La Sayona is a tale native to the Llanos and dates from colonial times. It is said to be the story of a very jealous woman who killed her husband and her mother, believing they were having an affair. Her mother, in her death agony, cursed her, saying: Sayona you shall be for ever, and in the name of God, so be it." That paragraph is, but for the commas, the one published on Spanish Wikipedia on 13 November 2008. The Obispos volume carries the census label "2004-2007", earlier than the article; the Cruz Paredes-Arismendi one carries "2004-2010", later. I cannot say who copied whom, and that is the honest conclusion: these are not three independent testimonies but one circulating text, and part of what looks like registered tradition is a photocopied paragraph. And no two recorded versions agree on who died. The chapter Carmen Pérez Montero devoted to the Sayona in Portuguesa state opens with a summary of her own, with no informant behind it, and says something else again: "she was a very pretty woman, but very jealous, extremely jealous, and on suspicion of infidelity she killed her husband" — the husband only. And she goes about "in a white saya". After that come the first-person testimonies, each headed by the name of the person telling it — Juan Francisco Tovar, Francisco Ignacio Pérez, Antonio 'Toñito' Angulo aged 42, Tomasa Pérez aged 85 — and none of them tells the origin at all: they tell encounters. The plains glossary of Erics Blanco (2024) says the opposite: "a woman who out of jealousy killed her own mother" — the mother only. The first version of the Spanish Wikipedia article, dated 13 November 2008, kills both and names nobody, with a different curse: "Sayona you shall be for ever, and in the name of God, so be it." The name "Melissa" that our old text used appears in none of these sources. And there is still a fourth, in the municipality of Pedraza, which resembles none of the others: "she was an evil woman who out of jealousy murdered her husband and killed her children. As punishment, God condemned her to be hideous and to wander the streets at night begging forgiveness." Here there is no mother, no stabbing and no maternal curse: the one who condemns is God, and what she does at night is not hunt men but ask to be pardoned. Four versions registered by the same census, on the same plains, and no two of them agree on who died or on who did the cursing. What does repeat across a whole century is short and always the same: a beautiful, tall, long-haired woman on a lonely road at night; an invitation; and, when the man comes close, the fangs. And a target: the reveller, the womaniser, the man out of the house at an hour when he should not be.

There is no site to visit, and that is worth saying first. La Sayona has no house, no grave and no shrine: she is a roadside apparition. The pin on our map marks the city of Barinas as a convention, so that she can be placed on the plains at all; it does not mark a place where the story happens. The official registers do localise her, and in several places at once. The First Census of Venezuelan Cultural Heritage places her "on the outskirts of the settlement of Sabanas de Bagazú", municipality of Biruaca (Apure); in the mountains of San Camilo, municipalities of Páez and Rómulo Gallegos, where she appears to the drovers taking cattle towards San Cristóbal; and as a belief of the whole municipality of San Fernando. The testimonies Carmen Pérez Montero gathered in Portuguesa put her at the Araure creek, at the spot called Los Palmares and on the old road towards San Carlos. None of those points is a monument: they are roads. What can be consulted, free of charge, are the documents. The municipal volumes of the Catálogo del Patrimonio Cultural Venezolano are online in full as PDFs; the chapter "La Sayona" from Pérez Montero's book downloads on its own from the digital library of Fundación Empresas Polar; Lisandro Alvarado's Glosarios are held by the National Library of Venezuela; Erics Blanco's Vocabulario coloquial del llanero is published open access by Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana; and "Pegujal", Gallegos's 1919 story, can be read in full in two separate digital libraries. This is a legend better studied from a desk than in the field. If you still want to go to the plains, the warning is serious and it is not ours. The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs advises against travelling to Venezuela unless necessary, singles out the border areas with Colombia — Apure among them — because of guerrilla activity, and expressly advises against travelling around the interior of the country at night. That is, literally, the Sayona's hour and the Sayona's place (advisory consulted on 16 August 2026). About the photograph on this page: it is a modern open-air sculpture of the Sayona, not a historic object. The Wikimedia Commons record describes it as "Statue of la Sayona in the Venezuelan plains", credits the user Neotours, dates it 1 January 2007 and shows it uploaded on 5 July 2019 under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. I have not been able to confirm which town it stands in, so we present it for what it is: a picture of the character, not a place to go.