Yacuruna

Also Known As: also Yakuruna, Yaku Runa; from Quechua *yaku*, “water,” and *runa*, “person, people”; called *karuara* by the Kukama of the lower Marañón
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Amazon Mythology, Indigenous South American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A people rather than an individual, the yacuruna hold cities beneath the rivers and lakes of the Upper Amazon, take humans down into them, and are counted among the strongest sources of healing power available to a shaman.
Role in Mythos: They are the other-than-human persons of the water realm, dangerous to the careless and indispensable to the vegetalista who can enter into right relationship with them.
Relation to Humans: They abduct swimmers, fishermen and young women, and the stolen gradually turn into yacuruna themselves, eyes first, then head and feet reversed so that the way home cannot be found. Some captives are instead taught the healing arts and released with their heads turned forward again, coming back to their villages as curers.

At the mouth of a river, where the current slackens and the surface goes to glass, the village on the bank appears a second time, upside down. Thatch, moored canoes, the pale stilts of a house, all of it hanging downward into green water. In the Upper Amazon that reflection is not treated as a trick of light. It is an address. People live there.

The yacuruna are those people. The name is Quechua, *yaku* for water and *runa* for person, and the plural is the whole point: not one river king but a population, a society keeping its own hours beneath the current. Their cities are said to sit at river mouths and on lake bottoms, and the older accounts describe them as inverted mirrors of human towns, the way a settlement doubles itself in still water at dusk. Inside, the descriptions turn extravagant. Palaces of crystal. Walls tiled in fish scales and pearl that shift colour as light moves through them. Feather hammocks slung beneath mosquito nets of butterfly wing.

Then the trick in the furniture shows itself. The hammocks are boas. The stools are turtles. The canoes drawn up outside are caimans, black and unhurried, waiting to be paddled. Every comfort in a yacuruna house is a living animal being made to hold still.

What one actually looks like depends on who is talking. Some accounts make them shaggy, matted with hair from crown to ankle. Some turn the head fully around so the face looks back along the spine. Some give them crooked or mismatched feet, the same signature carried by the chullachaqui out in the forest. Nobody agrees on the face. That inconsistency is not carelessness. A single creature has one appearance; a people can be described a dozen ways without anyone being wrong.

In one of Pablo Amaringo’s paintings the question is settled without argument. A hairy yacuruna leans back into the coils of his boa hammock with a long pipe in his hand, smoke rising off it into the water. He is not hunting anyone. He is at home on an ordinary afternoon, doing very little.

Among the Kukama of the lower Marañón the water people are called *karuara*, and their origin is plainer and considerably sadder. When someone drowns and the body is never recovered, that person has not died. They have moved. The river takes them into its villages, where the vanished go on living in a country that runs parallel to this one, with hammocks of boa, hats of stingray, shoes of catfish. Kukama elders describe the place with the specificity of somewhere they have been, and in a sense they have, because shamans travel down to consult karuara healers when a patient is past anything the surface can fix.

The mestizo villages along the Peruvian rivers tell it more often as abduction. Fishermen fail to come home. Girls turn up pregnant and cannot or will not say by whom. A woman bathing at the bank is pulled under and simply does not surface, and the assumption is not accident but courtship. What follows is described in stages, and it is the coldest thing in the tradition. The eyes go first, taking on the look of the water people. Then the head turns, and then the feet, until the stolen person faces backward and can no longer find the path home. There is nothing left to do but walk in the only direction still available, down. When it is finished it is finished.

They are also, without any sense of contradiction, among the great healers of the river. A vegetalista may summon a yacuruna as an ally, and the water people are held to be one of the places shamanic power genuinely comes from, on a level with the plant teachers themselves. The abducted are not always simply lost. A yacuruna may pass the healing arts to a captive, and once trust has been established, turn that person’s head around to face forward and let them climb back up the bank. Whoever returns returns useful.

Their limits are the shape of their own world. The yacuruna hold the water and the water’s edge is where their reach ends, which is why the stories cluster at the bathing place, the shallows, the moment of stepping in rather than the middle of the village. The reversal of the head is theirs alone to undo, so escape by force is not on the table; the only exit is a relationship, patiently earned. And once the change has run its full course, no account offers a way back.

Water people of this kind surface all along the eastern flank of the Andes. The Achuar speak of the tsunki, male and female, human in shape, living in rivers and lakes, keeping households that mirror Achuar households and taking human lovers, so that married men will talk quite casually about the second family they maintain underwater. Shuar tradition sharpens this into Tsunki, the first shaman of all, seated on a turtle stool in a house built of anacondas, the origin of shamanic power itself. Among the Napo Runa of Ecuador the yakuruna turn up in narrative as invisible powers of the river, and in ayahuasca visions they arrive by riverboat, the same *lancha* that brings traders upstream. Downstream in Brazil the botos come ashore as men in white suits and straw hats.

In 2024 a court in Nauta ruled that the Marañón River holds rights of its own and named the Kukama as its guardians, a decision upheld on appeal that October. The case was brought by a Kukama women’s federation, and part of what it defended was the country under the water. Oil spills do not only poison a river. They flood a city.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Yacuruna?

The yacuruna are a people of water beings from Amazonian tradition, most strongly associated with the Peruvian Upper Amazon. Their name comes from Quechua *yaku*, water, and *runa*, person. They live in cities beneath rivers and lakes, and they are both feared as abductors and sought out as healers.

What do the Yacuruna look like?

Descriptions disagree. Some accounts give the yacuruna bodies covered in hair, some give them heads that face backward on their shoulders, and some give them crooked or mismatched feet like the chullachaqui. Because they are a people rather than one creature, no single appearance is treated as the correct one.

What happens to people the Yacuruna take?

The change is described as gradual. The eyes alter first, then the head and feet turn backward so that the captive cannot find the way home and must continue down into the underwater city. Once the transformation is complete it cannot be reversed, and the person is a yacuruna.

Why would a shaman want to meet a Yacuruna?

Yacuruna are considered powerful healers and one of the genuine sources of shamanic ability. A vegetalista can summon one as an ally, and a yacuruna may teach the healing arts to someone it has taken, then turn that person’s head forward again and allow them to return to the human world as a curer.

What are the karuara?

Karuara is the Kukama name for the water people of the lower Marañón in Peru. In Kukama understanding, a person who drowns and is never found has not died but has gone to live in the underwater villages. Shamans call on karuara healers when treating serious illness.