Sacamantecas ("Fat extractor" in Spanish) or mantequero
[''Al Sur de Granada'', pages 190-193, ]Gerald Brenan
Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan, CBE, MC (7 April 1894 – 19 January 1987) was a British writer and hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain.
Brenan is best known for ''The Spanish Labyrinth'', a historical work on the background t ...
, 1997, Fábula - Tusquets Editores. Originally ''South from Granada
''South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village'' is an autobiographical book by Gerald Brenan, first published in 1957.
Brenan, a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, moved to Spain in 1919 and lived there on and off for the rest ...
'', 1957 ("Fat seller/maker") is the Spanish name for a kind of
bogeyman
The Bogeyman (; also spelled boogeyman, bogyman, bogieman, boogie monster, boogieman, or boogie woogie) is a type of mythic creature used by adults to frighten children into good behavior. Bogeymen have no specific appearance and conceptions var ...
[Sacamantecas](_blank)
in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española or criminal
characterized by killing for
human fat.
Anthropology
Julian Pitt-Rivers
Julian Alfred Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (16 March 1919 – 12 August 2001) was a British social anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a professor at universities in three countries.
Family background
Pitt-Rivers was a great-grandson of the archaeologi ...
reports
The People of the Sierra
', J. A. Pitt-Rivers, page 205, 1954, Criterion Books, New York. in his study of
Alcalá de la Sierra the belief that village children can be stolen by an outsider, called ''el sacamantecas'', disguised as a beggar or a trader, who is hired by a rich man whose ill child can only be cured with the blood of healthy babies.
The practice of
blood donation lent credence to the myth.
Gerald Brenan
Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan, CBE, MC (7 April 1894 – 19 January 1987) was a British writer and hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain.
Brenan is best known for ''The Spanish Labyrinth'', a historical work on the background t ...
describes the ''mantequero'' as a monster in human form who lives in deserted areas and feeds on ''manteca''
[manteca](_blank)
in the DRAE ("
human
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, cultu ...
fat
In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food.
The term often refers specifically to triglycerides (triple est ...
").
Upon capture, he shouts in a high-pitched voice and, unless just fed, looks thin.
Brenan found the myth alive during his stays in the
Alpujarra
The Alpujarra (, Arabic: ''al-bussarat'') is a natural and historical region in Andalusia, Spain, on the south slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the adjacent valley. The average elevation is above sea level. It extends over two provinces, ...
(Andalusia):
In 1927 or 1928, he had sublet his
Yegen
Yegen is a village of the municipality of Alpujarra de la Sierra in the province of Granada.
The village was the home of the British writer Gerald Brenan in the 1920s, and he described its customs in ''South from Granada'', one of his best-know ...
home to the British writer
Dick Strachey, nephew of
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey (; 1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of '' Eminent Victorians'', he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight ...
.
One day, Strachey was walking on rough terrain where he saw three suspicious men.
Fearing of
bandoleros, he ran away, but the three
Gipsies chased him and drew their knives shouting at him as a ''mantequero''.
The first impulse of the Gipsies was to kill the ''mantequero'' and
use his blood for magical remedies.
However the eldest Gipsy, a convict, judged safer to bring Strachey to the mayor.
They offered to slit his throat themselves, but the British man claimed in his rudimentary Spanish to be a relative of King
George V
George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936.
Born during the reign of his grandmother Qu ...
of the United Kingdom, convincing the mayor that he was not dealing with a monster.
A friend of Brenan found that in
Torremolinos
Torremolinos () is a municipality in Andalusia, southern Spain, west of Málaga. A poor fishing village before the growth in tourism began in the late 1950s, Torremolinos was the first of the Costa del Sol resorts to be developed and is still th ...
all the girls believed in ''mantequeros''.
In the urban version of the legend,
an old evil marquis needs baby
blood transfusion
Blood transfusion is the process of transferring blood products into a person's circulation intravenously. Transfusions are used for various medical conditions to replace lost components of the blood. Early transfusions used whole blood, but mo ...
s to rejuvenate.
Real sacamantecas
*
Manuel Blanco Romasanta
Manuel Blanco Romasanta (né Manuela; 18 November 1809 – 14 December 1863) was Spain's first recorded serial killer. In 1853, he admitted to thirteen murders, but claimed he was not responsible because he was suffering from a curse that caused ...
(1809-1863) was the first serial killer documented in Spain. He operated in
Galicia. With the fat of his victims he
made soap for sale. During his trial, he alleged to be cursed with
lycanthropy.
*
Juan Díaz de Garayo (1821-1881) was a Spanish serial killer operating in Northern Spain. He was nicknamed ''el Sacamantecas'', which became used to scare children into behaving.
* In 1910
Francisco Leona and Julio ''Tonto'' Hernández kidnapped and killed a boy of seven years for his blood and fat to treat the tuberculosis of Francisco Ortega, a wealthy farmer who hired the men for that purpose in what is known as the
Crime of Gádor.
Similar beliefs
*The Peruvian tradition of the
pishtaco
A pishtaco is a mythological boogeyman figure in the Andes region of South America, particularly in Peru and Bolivia. Some parts of the Andes refer to the pishtaco as kharisiri, or ñakaq, or lik'ichiri in the Aymara language.
Legend and its e ...
has many similarities being understood as monsters or
foreigners who collect human fat from their victims.
*Urban legends about
organ trafficking
Organ trade (also known as Red market) is the trading of human organs, tissues, or other body products, usually for transplantation.(Carney, Scott. 2011. "The Red Market." Wired 19, no. 2: 112–1. Internet and Personal Computing Abstracts.) Acco ...
show similar fears in modern contexts.
*
Vampire
A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deat ...
s in European folklore draw blood from humans.
*Brenan
finds a similarity between the ''mantequero'' and the Persian ''
manticore'' (a
man-eating
A man-eater is an animal that preys on humans as a pattern of hunting behavior. This does not include the scavenging of corpses, a single attack born of opportunity or desperate hunger, or the incidental eating of a human that the animal has kil ...
chimera cited by
H.J. Tarry,
Ctesias
Ctesias (; grc-gre, Κτησίας; fl. fifth century BC), also known as Ctesias of Cnidus, was a Greek physician and historian from the town of Cnidus in Caria, then part of the Achaemenid Empire.
Historical events
Ctesias, who lived in the fi ...
' ''
Persica'' and
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
's ''
History of Animals
''History of Animals'' ( grc-gre, Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν, ''Ton peri ta zoia historion'', "Inquiries on Animals"; la, Historia Animalium, "History of Animals") is one of the major texts on biology by the ancient Gr ...
'').
*Other bogeymen in Hispanic culture are the
coco, the
Sack Man and the
Tío del Saín (
Murcia
Murcia (, , ) is a city in south-eastern Spain, the capital and most populous city of the autonomous community of the Region of Murcia, and the seventh largest city in the country. It has a population of 460,349 inhabitants in 2021 (about one ...
).
In popular culture
*
Bernardo Atxaga
Bernardo Atxaga (born 27 July 1951), pseudonym of Joseba Irazu Garmendia, is a Spanish Basque writer and self-translator.
Biography
Atxaga was born in Asteasu, Gipuzkoa, Basque Country, Spain in 1951. He received a diploma in economics from t ...
's ''
Obabakoak'' includes a chapter on the Sacamantecas, stating that it was believed that baby fat was what made railways so fast.
*The 2009 Spanish short film Sacamantecas was directed by
Alejandro Ballesteros and
Antonio Curado.
References
{{Urban legends
Urban legends
Folklore
Spanish legendary creatures
Cannibalism in Europe
Galician mythology
Bogeymen