The Chupacabra of Canovanas
Puerto Rican livestock began turning up dead in 1995, and a witness in Canovanas gave the description every later chupacabra is drawn from. It matches the creature in a film that had opened in San Juan a month earlier.
Field Guide Entry
August 1995
Farm animals across Puerto Rico were being found dead with puncture wounds and, it was said, drained of blood. In the second week of August, Madelyne Tolentino looked out of a window in Canovanas and saw something in the street: around four feet tall, standing on two legs, with huge dark oval eyes, spines down its back and almost no nose.
Hers is the founding description. What the chupacabra looks like in every drawing, costume and news graphic since comes out of that account.
Species opened on July 7
The film Species reached Puerto Rican theaters on July 7, 1995, a month before Tolentino saw anything. Its creature, Sil, was designed by H.R. Giger: bipedal, roughly human height, with large dark eyes, a spined back and a smooth face.
Benjamin Radford spent five years on the case and published Tracking the Chupacabra in 2011. He interviewed Tolentino, established that she had seen the film before the sighting, and set her description beside Sil. They correspond closely, including details peculiar to the film rather than to any animal.
That is not proof she invented anything. It is a dated, documented route by which one specific image reached her before she used it.
The carcasses
The dead animals were real, and what happens when one is tested is consistent. The chupacabra carcasses sent to laboratories from Texas and northern Mexico come back as coyotes, dogs or raccoons with advanced sarcoptic mange, which strips the hair, thickens and shrinks the skin, and leaves an animal that resembles nothing familiar.
The blood draining does not survive examination either. A carcass left in heat loses blood to gravity and insects, and predators that puncture the neck are ordinary.
Canovanas took the story on. Its mayor, Jose Soto, led organized night hunts through the hills in 1995 and 1996, with volunteers and a caged goat.
Visiting Information
There is no chupacabra site with a sign on it. Canovanas is a working municipality east of San Juan on PR-3, and what it offers is the setting: the hills behind the town, the Rio Grande de Loiza, and El Yunque immediately to the south.
El Yunque is the practical day out and the reason most people drive this way. It is the only tropical rainforest in the United States national forest system, with a visitor center, waterfalls and marked trails, and reserving a vehicle entry slot ahead of time is now normal there.
If the chupacabra is the reason for the trip, the honest version is a drive through Canovanas and a conversation. The story is well known locally and opinions on it are not uniform, which is the interesting part.
Field Gallery
No approved field photos yet. You could be first.
Community Notes
No community notes yet.
Explore More Mysteries
Mothman Museum & Research Center
A storefront museum in downtown Point Pleasant dedicated to the red-eyed, winged figure first reported by five witnesses in November 1966, sightings that preceded the collapse of the Silver Bridge thirteen months later.
Ogopogo
The Syilx called it N'ha-a-itk and left an animal in the water as payment before crossing. The English name comes from a music hall song performed in Vernon in 1924. In 2021 the City of Vernon, which had held the trademark for decades, voted to hand it to the Okanagan Nation Alliance for one dollar.
Beast of Gévaudan
Between 1764 and 1767, a wolf-like animal killed close to a hundred people across the rural Margeride mountains, provoked a royal hunting campaign under Louis XV, and left behind a small pilgrim town so thoroughly built around the legend that you can walk the actual attack territory on marked trails today.
Bigfoot / Sasquatch
North America's most famous cryptid, a large, hair-covered bipedal creature reported across the Pacific Northwest for over a century, anchored by the 1958 footprint discovery that gave it its name and the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film that remains its most-debated piece of evidence.