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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesA Brazilian forest being with backward-pointing feet, Curupira can lead travellers astray, protect trees or disguise itself in a familiar voice.
Also recorded as Curupíra, Currupira
A woman hears her husband’s voice outside. The visitor wears his clothes, and she takes him for the hunter returning home. In the tale Maria dos Reis told to collector Herbert Huntington Smith, both voice and clothing belong to a deception that has already cost her husband his life. [1]
Read the manuscriptCurupira belongs to Brazilian forest accounts whose beings do not all look or behave alike. Smith calls the name a general one for several presences; naturalist Henry Walter Bates reports forms that change with locality. Curupíra and Currupira are spellings found in these printed records. Their differences extend beyond spelling: a voice in the trees, a small backward-footed figure and an intruder at the family hammock can all bear the name. [1][2][3]
Maria dos Reis’s story begins with a man leaving his wife and child to hunt. Curupira kills him, removes his heart and liver, and takes his clothes. Wearing them, it approaches the house and calls in the dead man’s voice. The wife roasts the meat it brings and serves it with manioc meal. She, the child and the visitor all eat. Curupira then lies in the hammock and asks for the child to be placed on its arm. Both fall asleep. [1]
When the woman comes to look, she recognizes Curupira. She packs clothes and utensils into a basket, quietly lifts the child away and puts a large wooden mortar in its place. With the basket on her back and the child on her hip, she leaves. The sleeper soon wakes and pursues her. She hides beneath a bush, where a bird calls out a clue to her hiding place. Curupira fails to understand and passes by. The woman takes another road, but the pursuer realizes its mistake and follows again. [1]
At a great hollow tree, she appeals to Curucuna, a frog that makes strong gum. The frog lowers a rope of gum so she can climb into the hollow. When Curupira arrives, Curucuna openly says that the woman is there. She fears it will let the pursuer up, but the frog promises to kill it. Gum already coats the trunk. Curupira climbs, sticks fast and dies. The woman takes her child and returns home. The frog has defeated the pursuer by revealing the truth about her hiding place and concealing what reaching it will cost. [1]
The story Smith draws from naturalist Charles Frederick Hartt begins with a hunter whom Curupira has led astray. At night the man rests at the foot of a tree. Knocking on a buttress wakes him, and Curupira asks what he is doing, then requests a piece of his heart. The hunter has killed a monkey. He offers part of its heart, passing it off as his own. Curupira likes it and asks for the rest. Once it has eaten everything, the hunter asks for the same favour. Curupira borrows his knife, cuts into its own body and falls dead. The man escapes.
Smith begins with a small brown humanlike figure whose feet point backward. A person following their apparent direction can turn toward the very being they hope to escape. Baldness, large ears and green teeth vary between descriptions. Bates adds shaggy hair and a life in the trees in one form, cloven feet and a bright red face in another. The red face in his account is a distinct detail, not a description of red hair. [1][2]
After telling her story, Maria warns of a voice calling from bushes. A listener approaches, hears it farther away and follows again, until the path is lost. The danger works through repeated invitations rather than a single overwhelming assault. Smith also describes the imitation of a bird’s call to draw hunters onward. Hearing something recognizable does not mean knowing who has made the sound. [1]
In O Selvagem, writer José Vieira Couto de Magalhães records another explanation for noise in the woods. Travelling by river in Pará, rowers hear distant knocking and say that Curupira is striking the sapupemas, the projecting buttress roots of trees. It tests whether they can withstand an approaching storm. People who fell or damage trees needlessly receive a different test: they wander through the forest for immense stretches of time, unable to find their way home. [3]
Santarém gives one of these stories a particular home. Smith identifies Maria dos Reis as a resident of the town and credits her before beginning her tale. The Amazonian material around it includes his conversations and passages from earlier books. Maria’s story is consequently one named telling within a much larger region, rather than a script for every community’s understanding of the forest. [1]
Bates places his discussion among the forests near Pará and the Magoary mills. He describes an unnamed young companion who would accompany him into the woods but would not go alone. An unexplained noise made the youth crouch behind him and ask to return. To quiet his fear, the companion plaited a young palm leaf into a ring and hung it on a branch along the path. Bates presents this as a recurring response, not a single encounter with a visible creature. [2]
In a letter dated at São Vicente at the end of May 1560, missionary José de Anchieta writes of corupira attacking people in woodland. He also describes feathers, fans, arrows and other objects left at a difficult mountain passage, with appeals for safe travel. His description of the beings as demons belongs to his Christian interpretation. The letter preserves an early name and reported practices; it gives neither backward feet nor the plot of Maria dos Reis’s tale. [5]
Magalhães approached forest beings differently in O Selvagem, published in 1876. He objected to accounts that made them uniformly malicious and argued that harm to a destructive person might protect other living things. Three years later, Smith’s Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast brought collected stories together with readings of Magalhães, Bates and Charles Frederick Hartt. Smith names Maria as his first storyteller; he expressly borrows the second hunter story from Hartt. [3][1]
In Bates’s forest, silence could break with the crash of a falling branch or an entire tree. Other noises resisted explanation: a metallic clang from a hollow trunk, or a piercing cry that did not repeat. His account of the Magoary walk sets these sounds among tall trees, shade and buttress roots large enough to form chambers. The companion’s palm ring belongs to a place where something heard might be close without becoming visible. [2]
Maria’s escape gives familiar places unexpected roles. Her home admits the killer because he wears the right clothes and uses the right voice. Refuge comes later in a hollow tree. The forest supplies both pursuer and helper, while an ordinary household mortar buys the woman time to carry her child away. Neither house nor woodland remains simply safe or dangerous throughout the journey. [1]
Smith sets the hunter’s false heart beside a Norwegian tale of an eating contest. A boy hides food in a sack beneath his coat, then shows its opening as though it were a hole in his stomach. The troll copies him and dies. Smith notices the common trick: one participant mistakes an imitation of bodily injury for the real thing. The comparison identifies a shared device, without establishing a historical route between the two tellings. [1]
For Magalhães, a guardian’s apparent cruelty could be a question of whose survival mattered. His discussion of hunting argues that protecting animals from needless destruction also preserves people’s food. His Curupira passage applies protection to trees. This is the collector’s stated interpretation, expressed within his broad nineteenth-century account of Indigenous religion; it does not supply an unspoken motive for every story carrying the name. [3]
Maria’s hunter has not been accused of damaging trees. Curupira attacks him and endangers his family without the story making that violence a deserved punishment. The wife and mother survives through recognition, preparation and another being’s help. In Hartt’s hunter story, a successful deception is followed by a gift and a condition. Protection, predation and obligation remain different relationships, even when the same name stands at their centre. [1][3]
São Paulo made Curupira a symbol of forest and animal protection in 1970. A monument donated by Ribeirão Preto’s mayor, Antônio Duarte Nogueira, was installed at the Horto Florestal that September. Vandalism damaged it in the 1990s. Institute employee Robinson Dias da Silva partly restored it; the Instituto Florestal’s 2019 history places it in the Museu Florestal Octávio Vecchi. [4]
Research by environmental educator Felipe Zanusso and museum representative Natália Almeida led them to sculptor Thirso Cruz, then eighty-two. He made a new figure for the Horto. It was installed on 21 September 2019 during the Festa das Árvores. The conservation emblem had acquired a history of its own: damage, repair, the search for a sculptor and a return to the park. [4]
These records preserve unequal encounters between speakers and collectors. Smith names Maria but prints her story in English. Bates records his companion’s fear while treating forest beliefs as an early stage of knowledge. His interpretation tells us about the naturalist as well as the walk. No continuous chain joins the corupira of Anchieta’s letter to Maria’s particular pursuit, and the later accounts disagree about bodies, households and intentions. [1][2][5]
Bates even gives Curupira a wife and children, and describes it coming down to cultivated clearings to steal cassava. The threatening presence has a household of its own. Beside Maria’s mother carrying her child home, that small detail leaves the forest less comfortably divided: the human household is not the only one whose needs bring it into contact with the surrounding woods and fields. [2][1]
Smith’s chapter XVIII, pages 561–566, contains both complete tales and identifies the second as borrowed from Hartt. Bates’s chapter II places Curupíra in the Magoary forest discussion. Magalhães’s pages 128–131 develop his argument about guardians; pages 138–139 describe Curupira’s care for trees. Anchieta’s letter appears on printed page 34 of the consulted Portuguese edition. The Instituto Florestal’s 2019 history follows the Horto monuments. [1][2][3][5][4]
Herbert Huntington Smith; Maria dos Reis, named storyteller · Charles Scribner’s Sons / Internet Archive · 1879
Chapter XVIII, pp. 561–566
The second hunter story is read through Smith’s presentation of Hartt, rather than a separate consultation of Hartt’s original.
Checked 2026-10-11
Henry Walter Bates · J. M. Dent / Project Gutenberg · 1863 · Everyman’s Library public text, 1910 edition reprinted 1914
Chapter II, walk to Magoary mills and Curupíra discussion
Checked 2026-10-11
José Vieira Couto de Magalhães · Typographia da Reforma / Internet Archive · 1876 · Portuguese
Part II, religious interpretation, pp. 128–131; Curupira, pp. 138–139
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑A year later, he remembers its green teeth and returns to collect them for beads. He finds the skeleton, takes up the skull and strikes a tooth with his hatchet. Curupira stands alive before him. Smiling, it thanks him for waking it, as though its death had been only a moment’s sleep. It gives him an enchanted arrow that will kill any game, but forbids him to tell anyone who supplied it. [1]
The gift transforms his hunting. Where he once had little success, he now brings home plentiful game every day. His wife asks what has changed. He resists her questions until at last he tells the whole story. He immediately falls dead. His earlier trick had secured an escape; this second encounter has given Curupira a power over his life that continues after he leaves the forest. [1]
Instituto Florestal · Instituto Florestal, São Paulo · 2019-10-03
Complete web essay
The museum location is reported as of 2019.
Checked 2026-10-11
José de Anchieta; Portuguese published letter edition · Conselho Nacional da Reserva da Biosfera da Mata Atlântica / Instituto Socioambiental · 1560 · Conselho caderno 7, 1997; reproduction of the 1933 Portuguese text · Portuguese translation
Letter dated end of May 1560; printed pp. 7–9, 34–35 (PDF pp. 5–6, 19)
The consulted 1997 volume reproduces a 1933 Portuguese edition; the original Latin manuscript was not examined.
Checked 2026-10-11