Escornau

The Escornau or Escornao is a monster from the folklore of Extremadura (Spain), more exactly, the legend was born near the small village of Ahigal at the north of Cáceres.

According to the legend, the creature was created by God as a punishment for the sins committed by the residents of Ahigal and is usually described as a beast with the hindquarters of a horse, the forequarters of a bull and a wild boar's head with a long and sharp horn in the front.

Lots of humans and animals became victims of the Escornau, but the beast had a special interest for the women. The legend says that when a man or an animal were attacked and killed by the escornau the creature left their bodies in the ground but, when the victim was a woman, the beast used its horn to skewer her body and then proceeded to walk around with it like a trophy.

The people of Ahigal tried to kill the beast in multiple occasions but they hadn't achieved anything, the skin of the beast was so hard that neither bullets nor the arrows were able to pass through it. Finally they realised that only God was able to stop the Escornau and they began to pray for mercy and organised processions to show their remorse.

At one of those processions was when, at the moment when the beast was going to attack some women present at the ceremony, God paralyzed the Escornau and inflated it until the animal exploded, the only remains of the creature that the explosion left was its horn which was kept as a relic on the hermitage of Ahigal, but now it's been lost for years and nobody knows where can it be.