Pyrenean hills
Sudden disorientation when the mist falls.
Risas en la Niebla
When the Intxixu play with travelers
Quick facts
- • Place: Montes de Euskal Herria
- • Nombre en euskera: Lainopean barreak
- • Seres implicados: Intxixu, viajeros
- • Motivos: travesuras, niebla, desorientación
- • Cronología: Tradición oral viva
The legend
When mist drops thick from the mountains, covering known paths and erasing familiar landmarks, the Intxixu awaken for their favorite pastime: making overconfident travelers lose their way. Their shrill laughter, like tiny glass bells, rings through the fog without anyone finding its source.
The elders of the farmhouses say that an experienced walker may travel the same path a thousand times, but the moment he hears that mocking laughter in the mist, he is lost. The Intxixu move the marker stones, hide the streams that served as guides, and make the mountain seem entirely unknown.
An old shepherd from Lesaka used to say that on one foggy night he heard the laughter so near that he felt something small brush against his leg. When he looked down, he saw nothing, but his staff had disappeared. He found it the next morning planted at the top of a crag impossible to climb.
The only defense against the Intxixu is to sit down where you are and wait for dawn. With the first light of the sun, they are said to grow bored and seek new victims. The traveler who keeps walking once the laughter begins may wander forever through a mountain that no longer feels like his own.
Associated places
The cheerful voices the mist carries without any fixed origin
The caution that says not to walk in dense fog.
Where the mist descends without warning and the Intxixu wait.
Walk fast and answer no voice that calls
Paths that disappear once the laughter begins.
In Basque tradition, Cantabrian fog has almost a personality of its own. It is not only a meteorological phenomenon, but a state in which worlds draw nearer and voices from the other side can filter into the visible world with an ease impossible on clear days.
