Fern Flower
Published on November 1, 2018

Belludo

Regions of expansion

Spain 1
Spain

Description

In Spanish mythology, a ghostly horse roaming the streets of a city.

Belludo (El Belludo), according to the urban legend of Granada (a city in southern Spain within the autonomous community of Andalusia) — A ghost horse roaming the old streets of the city in the vanguard of a pack of demonic dogs.

Thomas Janvier pointed out the parallels of this legend with the Mexican one Vaca de Lumbre, as well as the existence of a similar legend among the Basques, where we are talking about a ghostly, flaming cow.

In the original legend, this ghostly horse has no head and has wool instead of hair. She leads a string of invisible horses, which made themselves felt only by the sound of footsteps.

In Juan de Echevarria's book "Walking in Granada and its surroundings":

One night at one o'clock, he found one of these two ferocious animals," he says, "and he doesn't know if it was a Headless Horse or a Belludo, but he is inclined to believe that it was the latter, because it seemed to him that it had fur and no hair. He led a procession of invisible horses that could only be felt by the sound of their footsteps. As soon as he felt the proximity of the spirit, he grabbed the saber he was carrying and struck it three or four times. The spirit may have been scared when it saw the weapon and went on its way.

Washington Irving in the famous work "Tales of the Alhambra" mentions only Belludo, ignoring the headless horse:

Under the Tower of Seven Floors (is) the same place from where Belludo leaves at midnight and walks through the streets of Granada, pursued by a pack of hellhounds.

In "The Tale of Two Humble Statues":

..There was a monstrous remnant or ghost hidden there, which was said to have lived in this tower since the time of the Moors and guarded the treasures of a certain Muslim monarch. He also added to me that he sometimes went out at midnight and walked along the avenues of the Alhambra and the streets of Granada in the form of a headless horse, chased by six dogs that made terrible barking and frightening howling...

Sometimes this indomitable horse allowed himself to be saddled by some brave and greedy soul looking for adventures, especially when the first rays of dawn appeared on the horizon, he found himself on the ground, and Belludo ran next to his pack of dogs.


 

Belludo in popular culture