An illegal occupation of land by Lake Futalafquen in Chubut province, on the eastern side of the Los Alerces National Park (see map) took place a few years ago, and the Mapuche squatters called it a piece of their ancestral lands.
In fact the Mapuche lived further north mainly in Central Chile, later in Southern Chile, and only moved into Neuquén province, in Argentina to escape from the Spanish conquest. The natives of Chubut were the Tehuelche people, a different ethnic group.
These Mapuche called their "territory" by lake Futalufquen, Lof Paillako.
I found a report on their illegal occupation (read it here - in Spanish), and below is the part relating to their sightings of mysterious creatures in the area, like a cuero (more on the cuero in this post):
In some watering places or bogs, the forces of the land materialize as the water hide (cuero) or in an animal, like the white pony. Not all watering spots are the same, but through these apparitions, the Mapuche learn to recognize some menuko (bogs) due to the forces (newen) that live there, and the kimün (knowledge) that these have. These forces are usually named as "owners" (ngen) of the menuco... Several members of the community explained:
"...when I was a little girl we would go to wash at the trayenko [waterfall, the river is called Cascada, in Spanish, which means waterfall] that runs behind the Paillako. We would go in the morning because at midday you could not go, because there was the water hide (cuero). It was never seen going towards the lake.. it was out of respect, not going. The creature I most remember being mentioned was the choncón, and in my case I remember the subject of the frogs. Like they were evil. It was a harm, something evil. You could not see the frogs." Belén Salinas.
"An old lady from here, Mrs. Baldomero (Doña Emilia), said that she ahd seen on that stone known as the stone of the ducks, the stone that is between Bermúdez and here. Tha she had seen a small horse, on top of the stone. That is what she said. A horse as tiny as this, she said, but it stood upon the rock. And when it saw them, it rushed into the water. And nobody saw it again." (L.C.C.)
"At night you could see things, hear things. He said he saw a white horse. Their house was a wooden one, and outside was a large flat meadow, not one tree, and he said that in the meadow you could see a white horse that ran aroung, and he'd say to his wife: look, look at the horse, whose is it?"
Regarding the Chonchon, it is a bird-like creature, made of a human head, with sharp claws and large ears that it uses to fly about. It makes a sound like "tué, tué" and it appears when someone is dying.
In 2010 I posted about a cuero in Lake Futalaufquen.
On the Natives of Patagonia
An excerpt from my book
The Mapuche people, who in the past were known as Araucanian, lived in some parts of the northwestern area of Patagonia. During historic times, after the mid-1500s, they settled in the northern and central parts of the current province of Neuquén in Argentina, and Chile’s VIIIth, IXth, and Xth Regions were peopled after the mid-1500s.
They are distinct from the other Patagonian natives and were originally established in central Chile, from where they were first dislodged southwards by the Inca who invaded the region in the mid-1400s and incorporated this region into their Empire.
Spanish conquistadores, after destroying the Inca Empire, reached central Chile in 1541. Conquistador is the Spanish word for conqueror; they were the adventurers, soldiers, and explorers who took the New World by force, seeking gold, silver, and gemstones. They replicated the Inca serf system, making the natives work in the mines that produced precious metals. Violent and merciless, they found their match in Chile. Mapuche and Spaniards engaged in a war that continued for over three hundred years, the longest standoff between natives and Europeans in America. The Spanish conquest dislodged the Mapuche from their homeland and forced them to move south towards the Island of Chiloé and eastwards, deeper into the Andean forests.
They also moved across the Andes, settling on its eastern foothills in what is now Neuquén, Argentina, where they gradually “araucanized” the local natives, the Pehuenche = “people of the pehuén forests,” and Picunche = “people of the north,” who adopted their more convenient language (Mapudungun) which was the lingua franca that replaced the language of the Tehuelche. The Mapuche progressively extended their cultural influence eastwards towards the Pampas, and through war, trade, and cattle rustling, absorbed and araucanized the original Puelche inhabitants of Tehuelche blood during the 19th century. This was a slow process, and both cultures, Mapuche and Tehuelche, coexisted until their demise in the 1880s.The expedition led by Gerónimo Luis de Cabrera in 1620-21 from Río Cuarto in Córdoba province, Argentina, to the Andes in Aluminé, Neuquén, on the border with Chile, noted that the Puelche and the inhabitants of Central Neuquén all spoke the same language, Gennakenk, the Northern Tehuelche language called caguane by the Spaniards. However, at Aluminé, they also spoke “Chilean”, that is, Mapudungun.
Two centuries later, Theophilus Schmid, who served as an Anglican Missionary in Argentina’s Patagonia from 1858 to 1865, noted that “the Araucanians call themselves and their language Chilean,” showing that they still recognized their original homeland.
Research by Rodolfo Casamiquela, has shown that Gennakenk was spoken in southern Neuquén until the late 1700s and that it was used by the natives in Buenos Aires province until 1823.
The Mapuche were sedentary farmers who made pottery, worked silver, and wove the wool they obtained from the llama, which they domesticated. They lived in solid houses called rucas. These aspects distinguish them from all the other mainland Patagonian natives who were nomadic hunter-gatherers, lacking pottery and agriculture, who lived in leather tents known as toldos, and hunted guanaco, ñandú, skunks, and foxes. A large Mapuche community still inhabits its original homeland in Argentina and Chile.Tehuelche
They were the descendants of the ancient Patagonian Paleo-Indians. There are two versions about the origin of the name Tehuelche:21 one is that it comes from their words tehuel = “south” and chu = “land”, this suffix was later distorted by the Mapuche into che = “people”. The other is that the Mapuche called them chewuel = “surly”, “unsociable” and che = “people”, hence the “unfriendly people.” The Tehuelche, in turn, called the Mapuche yákarsh and Teluna-Küne.
We divide them into two distinct groups, each with cultural and linguistic differences: the Northern Tehuelche (Günnuna Kenna or Gennakenk – which, in their language, meant “people”) and the Southern Tehuelche. The region between the Senguer, Chubut, and Chico rivers was a flexible border between both groups.
Northern Tehuelche. Gradually, during the 17th century these northernmost Tehuelche expanded further north out of Patagonia, across the Negro and Colorado rivers and into the Pampas where they replaced the original natives of Buenos Aires province and became known as the Pampas or Puelche. The former because they lived in the prairies of the Pampa region, the latter, in Mapudungun, means “Eastern people.”
In the Pampas, they encountered vast quantities of free-roaming wild cattle and the horses that the Spaniards had bought to America (we will present an interesting theory about horses and cows in Chapter XVI).
The horse was quickly adopted, and through the Puelche, it rapidly spread south into the heart of Patagonia.
A group of Puelche who lived in what is now the Argentine province of La Pampa were known in Spanish as Ranqueles, from the name the Mapuche gave them Rankülche, from rankul = “reed,” che = “people”, as they lived near the scarce water sources in the arid open woodland or monte of that region. The original Gennakenk continued living in Patagonia between the Negro and Chubut rivers until their demise in the late 1800s.
Chüwach a Künna. There was yet another smaller group, on the eastern flanks of the Andes in the Argentine provinces of Chubut and Rio Negro. South of the Limay River, and north of the Senguer River. They were usually at war with the Mapuche, who frequently invaded their territory. Their name (Chüwach a Künna) means people at the edge of the mountains. Little is known about them.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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