05 Oct Putting the Sandals on the Cow
Putting the Sandals on the Cow
The Sandaled Cow – La Vaca Encutarrá
Panama’s countryside is chock full of lore and tradition, much of which is honored and relived today at festivals of all sorts held throughout the country. One such thing that is remembered in Antón each year during the town festival held in October is putting the sandals on the cow. Before answering the obvious question of why in the world anyone would put sandals on a cow, a bit about the language.
Traditional Panamanian leather sandals are called Cutarras, so when you put them on the cow, you encutarrar la vaca. Hence the sandaled cow is now La Vaca Encutarrada, or La Vaca Encutarrá, since in the countryside the endings of words are often slurred or simply dropped. Cutarras are traditionally made to fit but can now be bought off-the-shelf as well.
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source: http://gentefolk.net/vaca-encutarra/
So, why would you encutarrar la vaca?
Well, it turns out that if you’re a cattle rustler and want to confound the rancher and police, you bring a bunch of old worn out sandals and head out in the middle of the night. Once you find your target herd of cattle, you walk around and somehow manage to put the sandals on the cows facing backwards. Now when you lead the cows away, it looks like a bunch of people walked into the pasture. And as you and your sidekicks divide up to take the cows on different paths and trails to your rendezvous point, the sandal prints of the cows mix in with normal footprints along the way, making it extremely hard to track down the livestock. Or so the story goes.
This nefarious tradition (can it really be called a tradition?) is reenacted each year at the National Angry Bull Festival in Antón, always held mid-October. This year the festival celebrates its 50thanniversary from October 10 -14 in Antón. It’s a must-see event for a taste of history and a peek into life in the Panamanian countryside, or what I like to call The Real Panama.
About the author:
Rebecca Reiber came to Panama in 2005 to provide volunteer community planning and development services to a rural municipality in Darien. She has worked in rural communities throughout the country and now lives in Antón, where she is founding a permaculture based EcoVillage (http://8thLifePanama.org) and runs a cooperative shared living and working space called Casa Ubuntu.