The Wawa con Bigotes: Bolivia’s Mustached Baby Legend

The Wawa con Bigotes (Quechua/Spanish for “the baby with a mustache”) is a Bolivian urban legend from Sucre, in the Chuquisaca department, about a creature that looks like an abandoned infant wrapped in an aguayo cloth in a dark alley — until someone lifts the blanket and finds a fully grown, mustached, sharp-toothed face staring back. It is one of Bolivia's most retold childhood scare stories, passed on almost entirely by word of mouth rather than by any single written source.

What's Actually Verifiable

The Legend

The story, in its most common form, goes like this: two compadres — close drinking friends, bound by the Andean tradition of compadrazgo (godparent-like kinship) — leave a chichería, a bar serving the fermented corn drink chicha, late at night in Sucre. To get home they have to cross the Callejón de Santa Teresa, a narrow colonial alley that empties into darkness once the last cantina light goes out.

Partway through the alley, one of the men hears a baby crying. He finds a small bundle wrapped in an aguayo, the woven cloth used across the Andes to carry infants, lying abandoned on the cobblestones. Worried that a child has been left to die of cold, he picks it up and starts to unwrap it to check on the baby.

That's when the bundle answers back. As he pulls the cloth from its face, the thing inside says, “¡Y con dientes!” — “And with teeth!” — revealing an adult face with a thick mustache and a mouth full of sharpened teeth. In most tellings the sound it makes moving over the stones is compared to bone striking rock, not a baby's cry at all once you're close enough to hear it clearly.

One compadre bolts and hides inside the nearest house until morning. The other is not so lucky: accounts differ on what happens to him, but the recurring detail is that he is found the next day and can no longer speak, as if whatever grabbed him took his voice along with the fright.

Local tour guides and cultural sites in Sucre tell a closely related version under the name “wawa con dientes” (baby with teeth), suggesting the mustache and the teeth are two overlapping strands of what is really the same alley story, retold slightly differently depending on which grandmother told it to which child.

Why the Wawa con Bigotes Still Scares

Part of what keeps this legend circulating in Sucre and beyond, on Bolivian TikTok and YouTube channels retelling old cuentos, is how it inverts something so ordinary it barely registers as scary on its own: an abandoned baby in the cold, which any passerby feels obligated to help. The dread only lands in the instant the disguise fails — it isn't a monster jumping out from the dark, it's the moment your own compassion turns out to have been the trap.

It also fits a broader pattern in Andean urban legends, alongside figures like El Tío watching over Bolivian mine tunnels or the Pombero haunting Guaraní forests: a supernatural being that polices boundaries — in this case, the line between a public street at night and the private safety of home, and the instinct to intervene versus the instinct to keep walking.

FAQ

Is the Wawa con Bigotes based on a real event?

No specific, dated incident has ever been documented. The earliest written trace is folklorist Antonio Paredes Candia's 1947 oral collection, published decades later in 1984, which recorded it as an already-circulating story rather than as reportage of something that happened to a named person.

Where does the legend take place?

It is set in Sucre, the constitutional capital of Bolivia, in the Chuquisaca department, and specifically along the Callejón de Santa Teresa in the city's historic center.

What is a “wawa,” and why does that word matter here?

“Wawa” is the Quechua and Aymara word for baby or infant, still in everyday use across Bolivia's Spanish-speaking Andean regions. Naming the creature a “wawa” rather than simply “a baby” signals from the title itself that something in the bundle isn't what it appears to be.

Is “wawa con dientes” a different legend?

Local tourism accounts in Sucre use “wawa con dientes” (baby with teeth) to describe what appears to be the same core alley encounter, with the mustache and the teeth emphasized differently depending on the storyteller. There is no evidence they are two independently documented legends rather than one story told two ways.

Is the Callejón de Santa Teresa a real place tourists can visit?

Yes, it is a real alley in Sucre's colonial center, and it is named specifically in the folklore accounts and by the city's own tourism office as the setting of the legend.

Why do the two men in the story get different endings?

Versions disagree — that inconsistency is itself part of the oral-tradition nature of the tale, since no written original fixes a single “correct” ending the way a published short story would.