Directions The Galician Warewolf
Romasanta, popularly known as “the werewolf” or “the sacamantecas” (sacauntos in Galician), is the protagonist of a story where real events often intertwine with myth. Manuel Blanco Romasanta, his full name, is considered the first documented serial killer in Spain.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta was born in 1809 in Regueiro (Esgos, Ourense) and was registered at birth as Manuela, due to his feminine appearance and external female genitalia. Years later he was legally recognised as Manuel, a case that today is interpreted as an intersex condition in a society little prepared to understand difference. Of short stature – barely 1.37 metres – he could read and write, an unusual skill in the rural context of the time. He first worked as a tailor with his wife, Francisca, and after her death became a travelling salesman, moving through Galicia and parts of León and Asturias.
His first known victim was a court bailiff in León who was demanding payment of a debt. When the man’s body appeared in a nearby village, Romasanta fled and settled in the area of Allariz, where he blended into local life and became known as “the shopkeeper”. From there he offered to escort women and children to supposedly better jobs and opportunities in distant towns, but many of them never arrived. According to the trial records, he wrote letters to the families in the victims’ names to maintain the deception. Popular accounts add that he rendered the fat from the bodies to make soaps and ointments sold in Portugal, earning him the nickname sacaúntos or sacamantecas, sinister folk names for those who “take the fat” from their victims. He was accused of 17 murders, although he was finally convicted for 9 of them.
In the trial, he stated that he was under a curse that turned him into a werewolf and that he committed the crimes together with two other men who were also bewitched. Romasanta is considered the first documented serial killer in Spain and the only case of alleged clinical lycanthropy in the country.
Sentenced to death in 1853, his punishment was commuted to life imprisonment after the intervention of a French doctor interested in his case. Later research suggests that Romasanta died of cancer in the prison of Ceuta in 1863.
Today, the figure of Romasanta continues to inspire books, films and oral storytelling; woven between judicial documents and popular legends, his story remains one of the most unsettling tales of 19th-century Galicia.