“His heroic deed crossing the ocean from the north to the south of Spain, if it was not true, deserved to be true” reads a plaque next to the bank of the Miera River in Lierganes, Cantabria, which recalls the legendary story of Francisco de la Vega Cesar, better known as “the Fish Man”.

In the middle of the 17th Century, Francisco de la Vega and Maria Casar lived in Lierganes with their four children, the second of whom was named after his father, Francisco. He was very passionate about the water and spent hours and hours in the river, abandoning all his duties. On Sr. Johns eve in 1674, his mother surprised him leaving his clothes on the shore, ready to take another of his usual baths. Very angry, his mother warned him that he would be severely punished if he went into the water, but the threats had no effect. When she saw that he wasn’t paying attention to her, she cursed him saying: “So you become a fish if you don’t get out of the water”, and after this evil eye, Francisco never came out of the water again.

Or there was no evil eye at all and Francisco went swimming with his friends and swam down the river until he was lost from sight, as another version of the legend says. He was an excellent swimmer and his friends did not fear for him until hours later, when they saw that he wasn’t returning, and they left him for dead.

In 1679, a fisherman in the Bay of Cadiz, in the south of Spain, saw a strange aquatic being with a human appearance that disappeared as soon as they approached it. The event was repeated several days in a row until the fisherman managed to catch it. They were astonished to discover that the mysterious creature was a young, corpulent, pale-skinned, red-haired man. A line of scales ran down his throat to his stomach and another covered his back. His nails, worn down, seemed to have been corroded by the sea salt.

They took him to the convent of San Francisco, where they tried to speak to him in different languages, but he seemed to know none of them, as he was silent all the time. After a few days, he uttered one single word, Lierganes. In Cadiz, nobody knew what he was referring to, but fortunately, there was a Cantabrian who commented that in his land there was a town with the same name. They wrote to Lierganes and the news that arrived from there was surprising and extraordinary because the only one who fit the description was the young Francisco de la Vega, who had disappeared years before.

A friar accompanied him in 1680 to Lierganes, where his mother and brothers recognized him immediately: it was Francisco de la Vega. There he stayed to live with them and seemed to be calm for a long time, but he showed no interest in anything and stayed away from human contact.

Benito Feijoo (1676-1764), a religious scholar, made a study of this event, so extraordinary that he confessed that he would not have dared to bring it to light in his work if there had not been witnesses “worthy of faith” to verify it. The phenomenon continued to create curiosity years later, so much so that it interested the illustrious physician Gregorio Marañon (1887-1960), who reached wiser conclusions. According to him, the Fish-Man did not disappear while swimming, but probably embarked in Vizcaya on his way to Cadiz, and when he was found he was bathing as he was used to. According to the doctor, the Fish-Man may have suffered from diseases that made his skin dry and scaly, like that of a fish.

Whatever it is, “Truth or Legend“, the Fish Man’s greatest achievement was “to have crossed the centuries in the memory of men”, as the plaque in his honor in the Cantabrian village of Lierganes says.

Sources:

Arrizabalaga Mónica. (2018). El Hombre Pez de Lierganes . In España: La Historia Imaginada: De Los Antiguos Mitos a Las Leyendas contemporáneas (pp. 104–107). essay, Espasa.