Preying on the blood of the younger one, the vampiric Guajona from northern Spain is alleged to stalk the villages and valleys in Cantabria, thirsting for blood.
Within the grim and windswept villages of northern Spain in Cantabria there walks a terrifying determine from Cantabrian mythology. Referred to as the Guajona or generally Lamia, she is a spectral entity related to night time, starvation, and dying itself, an entity between a witch and vampire.
Learn Extra: Try all ghostly tales and legends from Spain
Cantabria is a historic neighborhood between the Basque nation, Asturias and Castile, going through the Cantabrian sea. The world is named the luxurious and inexperienced a part of Spain from the coast to the mountains. Its distant and mountainous area made it potential for them to protect each their celtic and Roman paganism for a very long time. And with it, their monsters as nicely.
Guajona and the Face of Starvation
The Guajona is described as a pale, gaunt girl with sunken options and lengthy, stringy hair that drapes her shoulders like tattered fabric. Her pores and skin is pale as bone, and her eyes are sometimes mentioned to glow faintly within the darkness. Her arms and ft are gnarled chook legs, her face is yellow and consumed by tough and furry warts, her eyes are tiny and brilliant as stars. Her aquiline nostril and mouth comprise a single black razor sharp tooth that extends lengthy sufficient to be beneath her chin and used to suck blood.
What marks her above all is her look of hunger. She is skinny to the purpose of grotesque, as if starvation itself has change into her kind.
The creature solely seems at night time. It’s unknown the place she is supposed to sleep in the course of the day though it’s suspected to be hiding underground. She feeds upon the life drive of these she encounters. Those that see her are mentioned to really feel a sudden chilly chill, an inexplicable weak spot, or a way of insufferable dread.
A Nightmare within the Evening
Descriptions of her actions are unsettling. She is typically mentioned to glide over the bottom with out making sound, showing abruptly behind vacationers on abandoned roads, creeping towards sleeping houses, or ready within the shadows of forests and village edges. Guajona invades houses with out getting observed and walks silently towards wholesome younger kids to suck their blood of their sleep by sticking her tooth into their veins.
She doesn’t kill them, as a substitute leaving them nearly cold so once they get up within the morning they are going to be drained, pale and discolored. Guajona additionally assaults adults. Some variations of the legend say she not solely drains life but in addition spirit. Those that encounter her could fall unwell in inexplicable methods, left pale and weak as if an unseen hand has taken from them one thing important. In older narratives, unexplained losing illness, sudden dying, and lifelong fatigue had been all generally attributed to an encounter with the Guajona.
A Cautionary Story of the Guaxa
The legend of Guajona is usually instructed along with the legend of the Guaxa from Asturia, the neighboring area to Cantabria. Actually, most locations on the northern a part of the Iberian peninsula from Portugal to Spain have their model of a bloodsucking witch entity nobody actually is aware of the place it comes from. Some would even declare it’s the identical legend, simply going beneath completely different names.
So what’s the distinction between the story of Guajona and the Astorian Guaxa? The lore behind the Guaxa follows a variety of the identical steps as with the Guajona. She’s described as an previous girl, sneaking into individuals’s houses to drink their blood. She notably loves the blood of kids.
Because the Guajona she is skinny, ugly coated in warts and is alleged to have a single sharp tooth. The Guaxa is usually mentioned to be invisible and mentioned to have the ability to slip although small cracks just like the chimney, and even the keyhole.
As with many vampiric beings from southern Europe, she is related to owls or different nocturnal birds. In Asturia, individuals can say “It seems just like the Guaxa has swallowed you,” when individuals have misplaced a variety of weight, because the Guaxa slowly over time drained individuals’s lives.
One factor that isn’t so typically talked about with the Guajona is tips on how to keep off or struggle towards the Guaxa with amulets or different rituals.
Learn Extra: A Cautionary Story of the Vampiric Guaxa from Asturia
Related creatures are present in Galician lore as nicely, going beneath the title of the Meiga Chuchona. The query is, the place did the legend evolve from? Ought to these entities be seen as the identical creature with completely different names, or is their geographical areas and variations sufficient to make them separate beings in folklore?
Origins of the Legend of the Guajona
Adriano García-Lomas, a scholar of those matters, maintains that the Guajona was invented by the folklorist Manuel Llano, based mostly on its Asturian equal. This opinion is widespread and may be thought-about the accepted one in the present day. A minimum of in Cantabrian, though the Asturian lore would say it’s the opposite approach.
Analysis of the lore exhibits that the legends return centuries at the least. As talked about, most of the vampiric and witch entities in Europe, particularly these areas taken over by the Roman empire, have a variety of issues in widespread with the traditional Greek Lamia. Maybe it’s all a mixture from south and north? Maybe there’s something notably scary lingering within the misty woods in Northern Spain?
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References:
Mitología cántabra – Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
