The Lupuna

I love local legends I am always talking to local villagers to tell me their stories, but someone that they have really experienced, not only the ones you read about, someone that they have personally experience or someone close that they know….

I was waiting for some guests who were visiting the local school and I was just walking around looking for different plants, then Rosa appeared, we started talking and chatting, I asked about that wonderful and huge tree we saw far inside the jungle, the one that rose on top of every other else….Oh.! She told me that is the Lupuna…..and here´s her story…

The Lupuna is a tree found in various parts of the Amazon. Is one of those beautiful giants of the Amazon, imposing and well rooted in the jungle soil. Its truck can be as wide as 10 mts. (33ft) when given the time to grow.

A new tale about the Mysterious Pink Dolphin

I was waiting for some guest in the local Yanallpa Community; I was talking to a local woman who was drying up fish and just chatting about her life.

“I would like to know more about the pink dolphins, I told her…..do you know any story from your village to tell me about…? and she told me….well I know a real story that happened here while I was a little girl…it was about Cecilia…..my mother’s very good friend…..

“The people here have a belief about the “bufeos colorados” (pink dolphins). They live in our world, but they also live beneath the water in a more beautiful world…..is a underwater world…an enchanted place, where harmony rules, one so beautiful that once you know it, you will never want to come back……we call it “Encante”. The bufeo is boss of this magical world and he has many magical powers too”…..!

Here lived some years ago a very beautiful girl called Cecilia. She used to wash her clothes in the rivers shore as all of us do. One day a bufeo swam by. He saw how pretty she was. He appreciated how hard she worked washing the clothes. He heard her humming a pretty song…..
The girl didn´t notice the dolphin. Day after day he swam by, hoping to see her and hopping she notice how much he liked her, but she didn´t…. She was thinking of other things…weeding the garden…making stew for dinner… she thought about her husband, a young man who worked in the forest.