Curupira

Also Known As: also Kurupira, Kurupiré, Currupira, Surrupira; from Tupi, read either as curu, a worn form of curumim “boy”, plus pira “body”, or from kuruba “scab, wart” plus pira “skin”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Brazilian Mythology, Native Brazilian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: His feet are turned backward so that every track he leaves reads as its own opposite, and he disorients hunters with whistles, shouts and imitations of the human voice.
Role in Mythos: He is the guardian of the game and the timber, punishing those who hunt or cut beyond need and letting subsistence hunters pass.
Relation to Humans: People deal with him by offering rather than by fighting, leaving tobacco and cachaça on forest trails, a habit the first Portuguese record already describes in 1560. Those who keep the rules are ignored or quietly helped; those who break them are led in circles until the way home is gone.

Before the storm arrives, something goes through the forest hitting the trees. It works the sapopemas first, the great flared buttress roots that brace the tallest trunks, and the sound carries a long way through wet air, a flat hollow knock, spaced and deliberate, like a man testing a wall. On the upper Amazon they say he does it with his heel. On the lower Amazon they say he uses something else, and they say it without smiling. Along the Tapajós he is said to swing an axe cut from a turtle’s shell. The instrument changes; the purpose does not. He is waking the trees so they will hold when the wind comes.

He has been in the written record since 1560, which makes him older on paper than almost anything else in Brazilian folklore. That May the Jesuit José de Anchieta sent home a description of the natural things of the captaincy of São Vicente, and among the plants and the animals he set down a rumour that ran, as he put it, in everyone’s mouth: that there were certain demons the Brasis called Curupira, who fell on the Indians in the bush, whipped them, hurt them and killed them. His own brothers in the order, he wrote, had seen the bodies. He also recorded what the people did about it. On a hard path that climbed through thorn scrub to the summit of the highest mountain, travellers passing that way left bird feathers, fans, arrows and things of that kind, and begged the Curupiras fervently to do them no harm. The offering is the older half of that sentence. Demon was the newcomer’s word.

The name is argued over. One reading takes curu as a shortened curumim, a boy, and pira as body, which gives something close to the body of a child. The other, favoured by the philologist who compiled the standard dictionary of Old Tupi, starts from kuruba, a scab or a wart, and reads pira as skin: a creature named for a ruined hide rather than a small frame. Both readings persist because both kinds of Curupira get described.

There is no single body. Around Santarém he stands four palms high. On the rio Negro he is bald with a shaggy trunk. In Pará he has no openings in him at all, nothing through which anything can leave. Along the Solimões his teeth are green, or blue. The people of the rio Uaupés give him two metres of height, hair everywhere, one eye in front and one behind, and backward feet more than a metre long, and they put him at the headwaters of the igarapés eating crabs. Elsewhere he is a red-haired dwarf, or an Indigenous boy of seven with long hair over his body, or a cannibal giant. He is widely said to have no speech at all, only guttural sound, which sets him between the people and the animals and is probably the whole idea. The one thing nobody disputes is the feet. Heels forward, toes behind, so that when he walks into the forest his prints say he is walking out of it.

What he keeps is the game and the timber, and he is hardest on anyone who takes pregnant females, unweaned young or the biggest trees. A man who drops one animal because his family has no other meat is not his enemy and may find the hunting unusually easy. The rule was never about killing.

A rubber-tapper stops where the trail forks, sets a twist of tobacco and a splash of cachaça on a stump, says almost nothing, and walks on. It costs him a few minutes. It buys a day in which the forest is only a forest.

When he does come for someone the method is confusion. The whistles start, long and shrill, from places that keep changing, and then comes the worse trick, a human voice calling from the trees the way a companion calls. Whoever answers it stops knowing where he is. He also sets out quarry that cannot be caught, an animal that stays exactly one thicket ahead until the hunter has run himself past exhaustion and past any path he recognises, and men are said to have died that way. Sometimes he lets the arrow land. The hunter walks up to collect what he shot, and the face turned up out of the leaf litter is his friend’s, or his son’s, or his wife’s.

The rest of the time he amuses himself. He counterfeits the crack and fall of a big tree, the knock of a woodpecker, the drumming of a buttress root, and the sound goes through a settlement like cold water. A collection of Rondônia folklore records that he draws the teeth from the people he kills and strings them on a necklace of human bone. The old study O tupi na geografia nacional has him presiding over bad thoughts and sending nightmares. Along the rio Cuieiras outside Manaus he is filed as an animal that is not game, a thing that hunts the hunter when the rules go unkept. Some hunters say he becomes an anteater, and that this is why no male anteater has ever been shot: the male is him.

Against all of it there are two doors, and both turn on the same flaw. He cannot leave a puzzle alone. Break little crosses from twigs, or twist rings out of cipó vine, and throw them back over your shoulder as you go; he will stop to take them apart, and the taking apart is enough. The other trick works on the opposite instinct. Cut into the bark of a tree with a machete while you run. He breaks off the chase to tend the wound. He would rather nurse a tree than catch a man. He can also simply be bought, which is what the tobacco and the cachaça are for, and the caboclos who leave them are not being sentimental. He does not come near towns or the scrubby second growth at their edges. He wants the dense stuff, far in.

Reading him as an ecological conscience is recent, and it has now been made official twice. In 1970 the governor of São Paulo instituted him as the state’s symbol of the guardian of the forests and the animals living in them. In July 2025 the Brazilian federal government made him the mascot of COP30, the United Nations climate conference held that November in Belém, in Pará. A Peruvian schoolbook calls him the ecological god of the Amazon. Under all of that the older figure is still legible, and he was never a symbol of anything. He was a reason to leave arrows on a mountain path and keep walking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Curupira?

The Curupira is a forest guardian of Brazilian and Tupi tradition, best known for having his feet turned backward so that his footprints lead the wrong way. He protects game animals and large trees, and he punishes hunters and woodcutters who take more than they need. He is one of the earliest Brazilian folk figures on record, first written down in 1560.

Why does the Curupira have backward feet?

The Curupira’s heels point forward and his toes point behind, so anyone following his trail travels in the opposite direction to the one he actually took. Regional descriptions of him disagree about almost everything else, including his height, his hair and his teeth, but the reversed feet appear in every version. On the rio Uaupés those feet are said to be over a metre long.

How do you escape the Curupira?

The traditional escape is to give him something to unravel: small crosses broken from twigs, or rings twisted out of cipó vine, thrown back over the shoulder while you keep moving. He stops to take them apart and loses the chase. A second method is to cut a tree’s bark with a machete as you run, because he will break off pursuit to tend the injured tree.

What does the Curupira do to hunters?

He disorients them with long whistles and shouts, and by imitating a human voice calling from the trees. He also sets a magical animal in front of them that can be chased but never caught, until the hunter is lost or worn out past recovery. In some tellings he allows the kill, and the dead animal is found wearing the face of the hunter’s friend, child or wife.

Where does the Curupira legend come from?

The Curupira comes from Tupi tradition in Brazil and appears in forests across the country, with related figures under other names in Paraguay, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Bolivia. The first known written mention is a May 1560 letter by the Jesuit José de Anchieta, describing the offerings people left on forest paths to keep him from harming them. He remains strongest in the Amazon, and was named the mascot of COP30 in Belém in 2025.