Guatemala’s best-known legends are La Llorona, La Siguanaba, El Cadejo and El Sombrerón, oral stories that, as the historian Aníbal Chajón told AGN, are narrated by someone who claims to have lived them, each with a lesson attached. La Tatuana reaches most readers another way: as a literary legend written by Miguel Ángel Asturias in Leyendas de Guatemala (Madrid, 1930).
In short: La Llorona killed her children and wanders looking for them; her cry sounds far when she is near. La Siguanaba is a beautiful woman who leads night-wandering men to a ravine. El Cadejo is a dog: a light one protects you, a black one is a warning. El Sombrerón haunts women who comb their hair at the window. El Wiin turns into an animal to steal. Asturias rewrote El Cadejo and El Sombrerón as origin stories and wrote La Tatuana’s escape on a tattooed boat.
The legends at a glance
| Legend | What happens (oral version) | Lesson, as Chajón gives it | In Asturias’s 1930 book? |
|---|---|---|---|
| La Llorona | A woman who killed her children wanders looking for them; she is heard more than seen | Do not do hidden things at night | No |
| La Siguanaba | A beautiful, half-dressed woman combing her hair lures men out for liquor and women, then walks them over a ravine | Do not go chasing women; do not be unfaithful | No |
| El Cadejo | A dog that guards or punishes depending on its colour | Not stated | Yes, Leyenda del Cadejo |
| El Sombrerón | A figure who seeks out beautiful women combing their hair at the window | A decent woman brushes her hair inside the house | Yes, Leyenda del Sombrerón |
| El Wiin (Chorakotel) | A person who turns into an animal and steals hens and money | Social balance: do not be ostentatious or vain | No |
| La Tatuana | A slave escapes the stake on a tattooed boat | Not in Chajón’s list for AGN | Yes, Leyenda de la Tatuana |
Oral versions: AGN, 1 May 2021, historian Aníbal Chajón. Book contents: the Ministry of Culture’s 2022 edition. Both read 10 November 2026.
La Llorona
Chajón’s version for AGN: La Llorona is the story of a woman who kills her children and then wanders searching for them. In his telling she is heard far more than she is seen: a cry is heard, and if it sounds far away it is because she is near, and if it sounds near, she is far away. The message, he says, is not to do hidden things, because whoever seeks the darkness of night does not want others to find out.
La Siguanaba
In Chajón’s telling, La Siguanaba is a beautiful woman who appears to men who go out at night looking for liquor and women. They see a half-dressed lady combing her hair and follow her, expecting a sexual favour; she keeps walking until they fall down a ravine to their death. The lesson he draws: do not go looking for women and do not be unfaithful.
Diario de Centro América told a fuller version in an October feature. In it she appears beside washing basins (pilas), water tanks or ravines, a woman of great beauty in a light-coloured dress that stands out in the dark. Her targets are womanisers, unfaithful men and men out late. From a distance she calmly combs her long hair and beckons. When the man tries to reach her or see her face, she turns and her face becomes a horse’s or a skull, with bulging eyes and a mocking laugh. The fright takes away his sense of direction and the strength in his legs; those who survive wake the next day lying in the bushes with high fever, scratches and a shock that lasts for days. The paper reads it as a lesson about trusting appearances and about recklessness in the darkest hours.
El Cadejo
Chajón describes El Cadejo as a character in the form of a dog that looks after or punishes people, depending on its colour. If a person goes out at night for something good, a light-coloured dog follows and protects them; if they go out to do bad things, such as drinking, a black one follows. In the oral tradition he cites, the more times someone sees the black Cadejo, the closer they are to death.
Asturias wrote his own, quite different Leyenda del Cadejo. It opens with the Cadejo that steals girls with long braids and knots horses’ manes, and it is an origin story set in a convent: it ends with the black braid of a novice, the future Madre Elvira de San Francisco, dragged to hell at midnight by a creature with goat’s hooves, rabbit’s ears and a bat’s face. Asturias closes the scene with the words así nace el Cadejo (that is how the Cadejo is born).
El Sombrerón
In Chajón’s version, El Sombrerón seeks out beautiful women who comb their hair at the window; by the legend’s rules, a woman would never go out with her hair loose, much less comb it where men could see her. He appears to her, does not let her eat, and through his lust she grows ill until she dies. The message Chajón attributes to the legend is that a decent woman brushes her hair inside the house, in her room, without showing herself at the window. That is the legend’s moral as he reports it, from another era, not advice.
Asturias’s Leyenda del Sombrerón is again an origin story. A mother asks a monk to read the Gospels over her son, who has been crying since he lost a ball beside the convent, a ball the neighbours said was the image of the devil. The monk throws the ball away from his cell; it lands outside the convent and opens like a black hat on the head of the boy running after it: the devil’s hat. The story ends y así nace al mundo el Sombrerón. A note in the book’s glossary says this legend repeats what nearly all Guatemalan legends show: an excessive love of the ball game.
At a 2025 Ministry of Culture legends tour, one visitor recalled, in the ministry’s report, that when the Sombrerón came near he thought it was going to braid his hair, as his father used to tell him.
El Wiin, or Chorakotel
Chajón adds a legend well known in the west of the country: El Wiin, also called Chorakotel, a person who can turn into an animal and, in that form, steals hens, money and other things. The remedy is to catch it, whip it, or find out who it is and say the suspected person’s name, so that they pay for their misdeeds. In many tellings, he says, people find a very large animal and beat it, and the next day a neighbour appears with welts on the face or body, and the culprit is revealed. The legend, Chajón says, seeks social balance: El Wiin robs people so that they will not be ostentatious, boastful or vain.
La Tatuana: Asturias’s legend
Leyenda de la Tatuana comes from Asturias’s book, not from Chajón’s list above; the Ministry of Culture’s edition says the book’s legends come from Guatemalan oral tradition. Its hero is Maestro Almendro, a priest with a pink beard who knows the secret of the plants that cure everything and is also a tree, the tree that walks. He and a slave woman are arrested in the name of God and the King, he as a sorcerer and she as possessed. Seven months later they are condemned to be burned in the Plaza Mayor. On the eve of the execution the Maestro tattoos a small boat on her arm with his fingernail and tells her that, whenever she is in danger, she can draw the boat on a wall, the ground or the air, close her eyes, step in and leave. She does exactly that, and the boat carries her out of the prison and away from death. The next morning the constables find in the prison a dry tree with two or three almond blossoms, still pink.
The glossary at the back of the book explains the name: Tatuana, or as it must originally have been, Tatuada (the tattooed one), for a tattoo with the magic power of making a person invisible and so helping prisoners escape the best-guarded jails. It links the story to Chimaltat, a goddess of K’iche’ mythology who becomes invisible by enchantment.
About Asturias’s book
The Ministry of Culture’s 2022 edition, the first bilingual edition in Spanish and Kaqchikel, gives the history: Asturias (1899-1974) released Leyendas de Guatemala on 18 April 1930 (Ediciones Oriente, Madrid); it was translated into French in 1932, and he added two stories in the definitive Spanish edition of 1948 (Editorial Pleamar, Buenos Aires). The 1930 stories are Leyenda del Volcán, del Cadejo, de la Tatuana, del Sombrerón and del tesoro del Lugar Florido; Los brujos de la tormenta primaveral and Cuculcán came in 1948. The ministry hosts the edition as a PDF (link in Sources).
The ministry’s 9 November 2026 statement adds that Asturias wrote the stories in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne under the ethnologist Georges Raynaud, that the book carries praise from the French poet Paul Valéry, and that it is considered a direct antecedent of magical realism. Diario de Centro América says the characters came from the folklore and oral tradition that Asturias heard from his mother. His other books are on our books and films about Guatemala list.
Where the legends are performed
- Palacio Nacional de la Cultura, Guatemala City. The Ministry of Culture staged a free Noche de Leyendas inspired by Asturias’s book on Saturday 7 November 2026, with actors performing the stories; Diario de Centro América reported that visitors could come dressed as their favourite character.
- Museo de Arte Colonial, Antigua. For the museum’s 89th anniversary the ministry ran a legends tour (reported 1 December 2025) for more than 200 people, with La Llorona, El Sombrerón, Pie de Lana and La Tatuana among the characters.
- Antigua night tours. Dates, prices and booking for Antigua’s legends nights are on our Antigua legends night tours guide.
For another Guatemalan tradition told in competing versions, see our page on Guatemalan worry dolls.
Sources
All read 10 November 2026.
- AGN: Las leyendas populares de Guatemala, 1 May 2021: historian Aníbal Chajón on La Llorona, La Siguanaba, El Cadejo, El Wiin and El Sombrerón.
- Diario de Centro América: El engaño nocturno de La Siguanaba, October feature.
- Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes: Miguel Ángel Asturias, Leyendas de Guatemala, bilingual Spanish-Kaqchikel edition, 2022 (PDF): publication history; texts of the Cadejo, Sombrerón and Tatuana legends; glossary.
- Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes: Leyendas de Guatemala, el libro que le abrió las puertas a Miguel Ángel Asturias en Europa, 9 November 2026: Paris, Raynaud, Valéry, Noche de Leyendas of 7 November 2026.
- Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes: Aniversario 89, las leyendas de Guatemala cobran vida en el Museo de Arte Colonial, 1 December 2025.
- Diario de Centro América: Visitantes se recrean en el universo de Leyendas de Guatemala: the palace night; Asturias’s mother as the source of the stories.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Guatemala's best-known legends, and what does each story say?
In the versions historian Aníbal Chajón gave the state news agency AGN in 2021: La Llorona is a woman who killed her children and wanders looking for them; La Siguanaba is a beautiful woman who leads men out drinking at night until they fall into a ravine; El Cadejo is a dog that protects (if light-coloured) or stalks (if black) people out at night; El Sombrerón pursues beautiful women who comb their hair at the window until they sicken and die; and El Wiin, known in the west, is a person who turns into an animal to steal. La Tatuana is a literary legend by Miguel Ángel Asturias, about a slave who escapes the stake on a boat tattooed on her arm.
How do you know if La Llorona is near?
In the version Chajón gave AGN, she is heard far more than she is seen: if the cry sounds far away, she is close; if it sounds close, she is far away.
Is El Cadejo good or evil?
Both, depending on its colour in Chajón’s version. A light-coloured dog follows and protects someone who goes out at night for something good; a black one follows someone out to do wrong, such as drinking, and the more often a person sees the black Cadejo, the closer they are to death.
What does La Siguanaba look like?
Diario de Centro América’s telling describes a woman of great beauty in a light-coloured dress, combing her long hair beside a washing basin, water tank or ravine. When the man following her tries to see her face, it turns into a horse’s face or a skull, with bulging eyes and a mocking laugh.
Who wrote La Tatuana?
Miguel Ángel Asturias, in Leyendas de Guatemala, published in Madrid on 18 April 1930. In his story Maestro Almendro tattoos a small boat on the arm of a slave condemned to be burned; she draws the boat, closes her eyes, steps into it and escapes. The Ministry of Culture published a bilingual Spanish and Kaqchikel edition of the book in 2022.
Where can I see Guatemalan legends performed?
The Ministry of Culture staged a Noche de Leyendas inspired by Asturias’s book at the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura on Saturday 7 November 2026, and a legends tour for the 89th anniversary of the Museo de Arte Colonial in Antigua (reported 1 December 2025). Private night tours in Antigua are covered on our Antigua legends night tours page.
