Bernabé Cobo on Andean Serpents and Water Beings

Record summary

Bernabé Cobo’s Historia del Nuevo Mundo, composed in the seventeenth century and published much later, records Andean plants, animals, customs, and religious concepts. Passages concerning large serpents and water-associated beings can be compared with Garcilaso, Guaman Poma, and earlier colonial sources to trace the amaru tradition and changing Spanish classifications. The delayed publication makes this a useful transmission-history case. Cobo’s descriptions combine observation, informants, classical analogies, and missionary interpretation, so they should not be treated as direct zoological testimony.