The Trauco of Chiloé
The Trauco is a misshapen forest being of Chiloé folklore in southern Chile, said to prey on young women. His story was long used to explain pregnancies when no father was named.
On Chiloé, families blamed the Trauco when a young woman became pregnant and the father was not known, and Spanish Wikipedia reports that the myth was also used to frighten girls into keeping their virginity. A 2026 study finds violence towards young women's sexuality running through the Trauco stories.
Memoria Chilena, the Chilean National Library's heritage site, places the Trauco among the Chilote myths tied to the dark forest of the islands' interior, alongside the Fiura. In 1915 Julio Vicuña Cifuentes, collecting Chilean oral tradition, described him as a deformed being, a kind of satyr in lust if not in shape. He wrote that mothers warned their daughters about the Trauco when sending them on errands far from home, and that the Trauco was named whenever something happened to a girl that could not be kept hidden. In 1914 Francisco J. Cavada wrote that the Trauco was said to deflower young women who wandered in the woods.
Spanish Wikipedia sets out what the story was used for. When a young woman on Chiloé became pregnant and the father was unknown, the family covered what it saw as the dishonour by blaming the Trauco. It reports the argument that the men of Chiloé took up the myth both to explain these so-called miraculous births and to frighten girls into keeping their virginity.
Both early writers cast the young women as the ones at fault; that framing is theirs. In the journal Pucara (2026) Dominique González Zamora and Gloria Baigorrotegui compare the Trauco with the boto of Brazil. They suggest that the Trauco stories carry more violence towards the sexuality of young women than the boto stories do.
"El Trauco es un ser deforme, especie de sátiro, al cual se parece, si no en la figura, en la lubricidad. «¡Cuidado con el Trauco!)- dicen las madres a sus hijas cuando las envían a la compra, lejos de casa, y con el Trauco se dis- culpan ellas siempre que les ocurre alguna novedad, de esas que no pueden quedar ocultas. (Castro)."
- Chiloé y los chilotes: estudios de folklore y lingüística de la provincia de Chiloé, Francisco J. Cavada (1914)
- Trauco, Wikipedia (español)
- Religiosidad, mito e identidad chilota, Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile
- Cosmovivencias en el fango: El mito del boto en Brasil y el Trauco en Chile como existencias anfibias, Dominique González Zamora and Gloria Baigorrotegui, Pucara 37 (2026)