The Tarasca (or Tarasque)

The Tarasca is the Spanish equivalent of a Provencal monster (the Tarasque), which seems to have even given its name to the town of Tarascon. The Tarasque is a gigantic zoomorphic hybrid with a strange lion’s head (with a human face and ears of a horse), a sharp tortoise shell, a scaly tail (ending with a sting of a scorpion) and six short legs. Jacobus de Voragine, in his Golden Legend (thirteenth century), provide us with a description. Legend has it that the Tarasque was born in Galicia, from the union of the incendiary monster Onachus and the famous Leviathan, and then he found refuge in the bed of the Rhone, in the Camargue. From there it went came terrorizing the inhabitants of that region and only after the providential intervention of Saint Martha of Bethany, managed to tame it. In Spain, the Tarasca is present in many places (Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Tarragona, Granada, Toledo, Barcelona), where it is often surmounted by a puppet of Anne Boleyn, as if to symbolize the union between the animal and the human face of the enemy of the Church.