Manuel Blanco Romasanta was a traveling peddler from the parish of Esgos, in the Galician province of Ourense, who was tried at Allariz in 1852 and 1853 for killing nine people: four women and five of their children. He had promised each family work as servants in the house of a priest in Santander or in Ourense, walked them out of their villages, and returned alone, selling their clothes and bringing their relatives letters he said the travelers had sent. After his arrest in Castile in July 1852 he confessed, and told the judges that a curse had turned him into a wolf.
The case is remembered in Spain as the trial of the "hombre lobo," the werewolf. The court did not accept the curse. Five doctors examined him and reported that he was neither insane nor an imbecile. He was sentenced to death in April 1853, but a letter about hypnotism from a lecturer in Algiers reached the government of Queen Isabella II, the case went through review in A Coruña, and a royal pardon in 1854 left him serving a life sentence. Researchers later traced his death to the prison at Ceuta in December 1863.
This account separates three layers. The first is the court record, which survives almost complete in the Arquivo do Reino de Galicia in A Coruña and has been studied by historians, psychiatrists and anthropologists. The second is what was said about him at the time, in the villages and in the newspapers, including the rumor that he rendered human fat. The third is the legend that grew afterward in books, films and folklore. Lycanthropy is treated here as what it was in the record: his own claim, and a belief of his time.
Two Galician terms run through the case. Lobishome means werewolf, a person believed to turn into a wolf; Mariño Ferro's 1995 study of the figure is titled Lobos, lobas e lobishomes. The anthropologist Xosé Ramón Mariño Ferro, writing with the psychiatrist Ángela Torres Iglesias in 2007, explains the figure as a moral image: in European tradition the wolf stood for violence, greed and lust, and stories of men turned into wolves were a way of describing such people, sometimes as the result of a parent's curse.
The second term is home do unto, in Castilian sacamantecas: the "fat-taker," a figure of folk fear said to kill people for their body fat. During 1851 his neighbors began to say that Romasanta was one. The rumor held that he sold the fat in Portugal. No court finding supports it.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta was born on November 18, 1809, in O Regueiro, a hamlet of Santa Olaia de Esgos, the son of Miguel Blanco and María Romasanta, according to Torres Iglesias and Mariño Ferro. Like most men of the poor farming parish, he made his living on the road. He could read and write, which was unusual in rural Galicia at the time, and witnesses later remarked that he took up tasks his neighbors thought of as women's work, both at home and as a hired laborer. He was very short. The doctors who examined him in 1852 gave his height as five feet less an inch, which the 2007 study converts to 1.37 meters, and described a man of light brown complexion and black hair and beard, balding on top.
His baptism record is the source of a later debate. The parish registers of Esgos record the child baptized in 1809 under the name Manuela, in two copies, and no Manuel Blanco Romasanta appears in the books before or after that date. When he was confirmed, at the age of 15 according to the 2007 study, he appears as Manuel. The meaning of the discrepancy is discussed below.
On March 3, 1831, at 21, he married Francisca Gómez Vázquez of Soutelo, a village in the same parish, who was about a year and a half older than he was. During the marriage he sold hardware from village to village. Francisca died on March 23, 1834.
After her death his life became fully itinerant. He and some of his brothers traded as traveling merchants through the Bierzo, León and parts of Castile, the researchers Cástor and Félix Castro Vicente told the Diario de León in 2023. In his home parish, rumors gathered: that he had killed a former servant of the prior of San Pedro de Rocas, a man the Castro Vicente brothers name as Antonio Fraile, after traveling with him to Castile; and that in 1834 he had killed a peddler, Manuel Ferreiro, with whom he went to Portugal. Neither suspicion was ever tried.
In August 1843 Romasanta was running a shop in Pardavé, near Matallana de Torío, in the province of León. He had promised marriage to Catalina Fernández, a woman 18 years older than he was who lived with her brother, the parish priest of Cubillas. On August 22, according to the Castro Vicente brothers, a constable from León, Vicente Fernández, seized the shop over debts owed to a León merchant, Miguel Sardo. On August 25 the constable was found dead in the hills of Tremor de Abajo.
Romasanta left León in haste. On October 10, 1844, the court of first instance at Ponferrada convicted him in his absence and sentenced him to ten years in a presidio, "without prejudice to hearing him when he presented himself or was found." The Audiencia of Valladolid confirmed the sentence that December. Torres Iglesias and Mariño Ferro stress that the conviction rested on suspicion, made heavier by his failure to appear, and that the court itself said it lacked proof clear enough to seek a death sentence. The Diario de León, reporting in 2021, noted that even the researchers were not certain the constable was killed by Romasanta, and that the Ponferrada case file has never been found. This conviction is not counted among the nine killings proven at Allariz.
With the León courts behind him, Romasanta did not go home to Esgos, the first place anyone would look. He settled in the parish of Rebordechao, in Vilar de Barrio. For two years he lived and worked as a day laborer in the house of Andrés Blanco, who had known him and his family for years. In slack months he went to Portugal to buy contraband goods and sold them at fairs and markets.
The record, as summarized in 2007, describes a man who was well liked. His landlord valued his friendly character, measured speech and willingness to help with any job, except slaughtering animals, because he said he could not bear the sight of blood. He became known as devout. He served the parish priest of Rebordechao as a servant and went with him on trips to Ourense and on visits to the priests of O Castro de Laza and Camba. The court's doctors later described this piety as a means to an end.
The nine people named in the indictment belonged to two connected families. Five were the García Blanco sisters and their children, from O Castro de Laza and Rebordechao; the others were Antonia Rúa Carneiro and her two daughters, of Rebordechao. Their stories come from the testimony of their brothers, sisters and neighbors, more than 135 witness statements in all according to the Castro Vicente brothers.
Manuela García Blanco was born in O Castro de Laza and lived in Rebordechao. She was almost ten years older than Romasanta. At 37 she had a daughter, Petra (Petronila), outside marriage; she later married Pascual Merello, was widowed, and in 1838 married Pascual Gómez, a widower of Rebordechao, a marriage that broke down soon afterward. Through Manuela, Romasanta came to know her sisters and brothers: Benita, Josefa, María, Bárbara, José and Luis García Blanco.
Benita García Blanco was considerably younger than Manuela. She had a son, Francisco, at 24, and later married Francisco Núñez Somoza of the hamlet of Souteloverde, a difficult marriage. She had no house, land or livestock of her own.
Antonia Rúa Carneiro was a single woman of Rebordechao with two daughters, María Dolores and Peregrina, and a small inheritance from her mother worth about 600 reales.
Josefa García Blanco, unmarried and nearly 50, had a son, José, whom the indictment names José Pazos.
The 2007 study describes the pattern the record shows: he chose widows without resources and unmarried mothers with young children, won their affection with promises of a better life, dealt in their property for his own profit, and deceived their families.
In 1845 Romasanta and Manuela García became friends, and by early 1846 they were a couple. Manuela and her daughter went with him around the parishes selling goods; she had bought stock from him with 500 reales from the sale of livestock she shared with her husband. Early in 1846 she agreed to sell her small house in Rebordechao for about 60 reales.
On March 30, 1846, while Manuela was away closing the sale, Romasanta took Petra, then 13, toward the Sierra de San Mamede. When Manuela came back with the money and asked for her daughter, he told her he had sent the girl to be a servant in the house of a priest in Santander, a man he had often spoken of. Eight days later Manuela set out to follow her, hoping to join her daughter and to work for the same well-off priest, who, he assured her, would not mind her age, 46, or that she was separated and had a child. Romasanta came back a few days later.
For months he told anyone who asked that the two were living well with a priest in Santander. To Brígida Aguilar, the wife of Luis García Blanco, he said Asturias instead. He told the sisters he had a letter from Manuela saying she was happy and well paid. The 2007 study observes that he had never traveled to either province.
After Manuela left, Romasanta turned to her sister Benita, who was in a similar position. He promised her a place as a servant to a priest who lived near Manuela's employer. Benita hesitated to start over among strangers; what decided her, according to the record, was a letter from Manuela, brought by Romasanta, in which her sister said she was fortunate and urged her to come.
In late January 1847 the abbot of O Castro de Laza, making his first parish census, listed Benita and her son as absent from Souteloverde. In March, nearly a year after Manuela's departure, Romasanta organized the journey for Benita and Francisco, who was nine. Within weeks he was selling a bedspread, three shirts and Benita's skirt in nearby parishes. He later told Luis García Blanco that Benita had won the lottery and had sent Francisco to study law.
The good news from Santander was so convincing that a third sister, María, a widow of 58, asked him in 1850 to find her a place too. He advised her to sell her oxen first, since the journey cost money. She wanted to leave the oxen to her son, would not sell, and never went.
Romasanta's attention turned to Antonia Rúa Carneiro, with whom he had an open relationship. He promised to marry her and set up a shop in Castile, she told relatives; to others she spoke of work as a servant in Ourense or near the García Blanco sisters. The day before she left, she sold him all her property, and he owed her the price. On Palm Sunday 1850, during the long Mass, Antonia left Rebordechao with her younger daughter, Peregrina, a small child not yet three. Romasanta returned two or three days later along the Prado road, driving goats he had bought in Riobó, and took over Antonia's land.
Antonia's elder daughter, María Dolores, about 11, had stayed behind. She lived with an aunt and then with Luis García Blanco in Prado until Romasanta took her to live with him, and the child went willingly because he gave her a better life. After four or five months, one autumn day in 1850, he took her away, telling the neighbors he was bringing her to her mother.
Antonia's defense lawyer at Allariz later found it hard to believe that grown women with small children would trust such promises. The record, as historians read it, suggests why they did: these were women in poverty, at a time when many Galicians emigrated to Castile, Portugal and the Americas, and the letters seemed to prove that the others had done well.
In the same period Romasanta courted Josefa García Blanco, visiting her often, sometimes on the parish priest's mule. She and her son, José, 21, would not commit. On June 22, 1850, he read Josefa a letter from her sisters and, against his usual habit, left it with her; her sister María kept it. In November he proposed that José go first to see whether he liked Santander. A few days later the two set out on foot. José was wearing a new brown cloak of coarse Tarragona cloth. Romasanta came back after three or four days wearing the cloak, and sold it to the priest the next day for 70 reales.
A few months later a letter from José, delivered by Romasanta, told his mother he was content, and Romasanta said he had found her a servant's post with a rich priest who would pay a gold onza a year. On New Year's Day 1851, at 49, Josefa left O Castro de Laza for the mountains of Santander, dressed in a black wool and linen skirt, a red velvet bodice and a blue and red checked kerchief. In the following weeks Romasanta offered her clothes for sale in the neighboring parishes. He gave Luis García Blanco the shoes Josefa had worn the day she left, as a present for Luis's daughter from her aunt.
In June 1851 a neighbor told Bárbara García Blanco that Romasanta had sold several of Josefa's silk kerchiefs in Santa Mariña de Augas Santas. A traveling castrator from San Vitoiro, near Allariz, passing through O Castro de Laza, said the same: the Canicha was selling her sisters' clothes. On the eve of the feast of Saint James, José García Blanco visited Romasanta, who offered him bread and cut it with a large white-handled knife with black spots. José recognized it as Josefa's. He went home and told his sister María he believed Romasanta had killed her.
The rumor spread through the villages: that he had killed the women and children, and that he had killed so many because he took their fat to sell in Portugal. In the parishes he became the home do unto, the sacamantecas.
On October 20, 1851, frightened by the strength of the suspicion, Romasanta left Rebordechao. After a period in hiding he reached Vilariño de Conso. In February 1852, with a false certificate and under the name Antonio Gómez, a native of Montederramo, he obtained the internal passport then required to travel to Castile. The Diario de León noted in 2021 that crossing from Galicia into León required such a document.
By June 1852 Romasanta was working as a harvester in Castile, like many Galicians in summer, in the village of Nombela in the province of Toledo. On Friday, July 2, 1852, three men from Laza who were harvesting there recognized him; they knew he was suspected of killing the García Blanco sisters. The village mayor, who then acted as a judge of first instance, questioned him, and then the judge of Escalona. The man calling himself Antonio Gómez denied everything. The judge ordered him sent to the court at Verín, the judicial district that included Montederramo.
Back in Ourense, the town council of Laza reported on August 28, 1852, that after days of searching, local officials had found no trace of the García Blanco sisters, dead or alive.
On August 25, 1852, the judge of first instance at Verín questioned him. He dropped the false name and gave his own, a native of O Regueiro in Esgos, a peddler. Asked why he had changed his name, he confessed: not only to the deaths of the García Blanco sisters but to eating human flesh with two companions.
As the 2007 study summarizes the record, he said that for 13 years, until the feast of Saint Peter, June 29, 1852, a curse from one of his relatives, perhaps his parents or his mother-in-law, had driven him to a wandering, criminal life, killing people and feeding on their flesh, sometimes alone and sometimes with two companions: a man from Valencia called don Genaro, and a certain Antonio from the same region. Asked what weapon they had used, he said none: because of the curse, the three rolled on the ground, became wolves, and in that form devoured their victims.
Days later, before the judge of Allariz, he added that when the three recovered their human form, and with it their lost reason, they remembered what they had done and wept, don Genaro most of all, and that they kept the shape of wolves for two, four and even eight days at a time. Neither companion was ever identified.
He also confessed to devouring other people in the Vilariño de Conso area. Witnesses at the trial testified that wolves had killed those people, but they spoke of real wolves, not werewolves, and those deaths were not charged against him. El País, reporting in 2003, put his confessed total at 13.
He told the investigators he had killed the García Blanco sisters at several places in the Sierra de San Mamede. At one of them, called Corgo do Boi, he himself found a bone that he said must belong to one of the victims. A doctor took his pulse at that moment and, according to the record, found no change at all.
On October 6, 1852, the third chamber of the Audiencia of A Coruña, which supervised the courts of all four Galician provinces, ordered the proceedings concentrated in a single court, at Allariz, to avoid rivalry and delay among the judges of Verín and Allariz.
The case began without bodies. For months the judge sent requests to courts in Santander and other provinces asking them to look for the missing women and children; every reply was negative. Apart from the bone Romasanta pointed out at Corgo do Boi, the record as summarized in 2007 describes no remains, and the places where the victims' remains lie are still unknown, the Castro Vicente brothers said in 2023.
The prosecution's case rested on his confession, on the sale of the victims' clothes and on the property he had taken.
In October 1852 the judge of Allariz asked five doctors of the town for a report on the prisoner. They examined him, recording among other things his height, pulse and the shape of his skull, and delivered their report on December 26, 1852; the 2007 study calls it a fundamental and controversial piece of the trial. Adiante Galicia, interviewing Bustillo in 2014, gave the number of doctors as six. None of them was a psychiatrist; Galicia then had no asylum at all (the one at Conxo was founded in 1885), and the historian Roberto Bustillo of the University of Vigo stressed in 2014 that Romasanta was never seen by a psychiatrist.
The doctors' conclusion was firm. A madman, they wrote, acts blindly in search of immediate satisfaction and does not disguise his actions. Manuel Blanco, by contrast, calculated means, timing and circumstances, did not kill without motive or attack without opportunity, and hid because he knew he was doing wrong. "He seduces to rob, kills to hide, prays to seduce," they wrote. He was "neither mad, nor an imbecile, nor a monomaniac," but a cold, calm and accomplished criminal who acted freely and knowingly. His confession had come from surprise, because he believed everything had been discovered. His excuse, they wrote, was a worn-out and impertinent subterfuge, his acts of piety a sacrilegious trick: "his impulsive fate is a blasphemy; his metamorphosis, a sarcasm."
On February 3, 1853, the judge closed the investigation and the charges were read. The prosecutor accused him of the premeditated, treacherous killing of Manuela García and her daughter Petra on the hill of A Redondela; of Benita García and her son Francisco at Corgo do Boi in the Sierra de San Mamede; of José Pazos and his mother Josefa García, and of Antonia Rúa and her daughter Peregrina, in the wood of As Gorvias in the same sierra; and of María Rúa at A Redondela.
His court-appointed lawyer, Manuel Garrán, built his defense in a few days on two points. First, there was no proof that the missing people had been killed at all. Second, the self-accusation of a poor, mentally ill man was not enough to prove guilt. He argued that Romasanta's liking for women's work showed that he did not have a hard heart, and he expressed disbelief that women carrying small children of illegitimate birth could have hoped to find good positions in the houses of priests and rich people.
On April 6, 1853, the court of Allariz gave its judgment. It sentenced Manuel Blanco Romasanta to death by the garrote. He was 43.
A death sentence went automatically to the Audiencia of A Coruña. The case entered review there on May 7, 1853. The prosecutor was Luciano de la Bastida; the defense lawyer was Manuel Rúa Figueroa, who later called it a notable and celebrated case "perhaps as much or more than the most celebrated" in the history of the courts, and in 1859 published a summary of it in Madrid. Both sides largely repeated the arguments made at Allariz.
While the review was pending, a new figure entered the case. A man who signed himself Mr. Philips, a professor of "electro-biology" (the name then used for what would now be called hypnosis) who lived in Algiers, had read about Romasanta in the newspapers.
Through the Spanish consul in Algiers, Philips wrote to the Minister of Grace and Justice. He argued that lycanthropy could sometimes come from a disorder of the brain but in most cases was induced by hypnosis, and he offered to give a demonstration before the court in A Coruña. Some researchers suppose that Philips was the French physician Joseph-Pierre Durand de Gros (1826 to 1900); the 2007 study reports this only as a supposition.
On July 24, 1853, Isabella II's government forwarded the letter to the Audiencia of A Coruña with a recommendation that it be studied with care, for the better guidance of justice and in view of a scientific discovery that might affect the fate of humanity. It also ordered that if Romasanta were sentenced to death, the execution should be suspended. The prosecutor rejected the intervention, since the prisoner was not mad. Romasanta's own defense also rejected Philips's theory that hypnosis had turned him into a wolf.
On November 9, 1853, the Audiencia of A Coruña gave its judgment. It sentenced Romasanta to life imprisonment, cadena perpetua, but not for murder: for the illegal detention of the people who had disappeared. The bodies had never been found. The prosecutor disagreed and appealed to the first chamber on November 14.
On May 17, 1854, a royal pardon from Isabella II reached the first chamber of the Audiencia. Three days later the court gave its final judgment, which was again a sentence of death. The pardon meant he would not be executed; he would serve life instead. The Faro de Ceuta, in 2011, quoted a historian's explanation that the penal code then required those sentenced to life to serve outside the peninsula, in Africa, the Canary Islands or overseas.
The last trace of him in the Galician record, according to the 2007 study, is his entry into the presidio of A Coruña on October 7, 1854.
For more than a century, what happened to him afterward was uncertain. It was long believed that he had died in the prison at Allariz; one 2010 article in a Spanish criminology journal still gave his death as 1854, in the prison where he was serving his sentence. A documentary on Galician television suggested other places, among them the castle of San Antón in A Coruña.
In October 2011 the brothers Cástor and Félix Castro Vicente, who have studied the case since 2006, presented evidence from the press of 1863, found through the Biblioteca Nacional de España. La Esperanza reported on December 21, 1863, that he had died in the plaza of Ceuta on the 14th, of stomach cancer, and La Iberia reported on December 23 that the man "known throughout Spain as 'the Wolf Man'" had died in Ceuta. A weekly, El Periódico para todos, had published an article by Antonio de San Martín saying he was imprisoned there. The Faro de Ceuta reported the findings on October 31, 2011.
Later research added a record from his home parish. The death register of Esgos, found in 2012, notes a memorial Mass marking the first anniversary of his death, held on December 16, 1864, paid for by his brother Antonio, who lived in Pola de Gordón, the Castro Vicente brothers told the Diario de León in 2023. That fits a death in December 1863.
His death certificate has not been found. Which prison in Ceuta held him, El Hacho or the Cuartel de las Heras, is uncertain. The parish of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, where convicts were buried, has penal colony death registers only from 1869, and its book for 1863 no longer exists; the civil records digitized by the city do not include him. The researchers believe he was buried in a common grave. Ricardo Magaz, a lecturer in criminal phenomenology at Spain's national distance university, wrote in 2024 that he too had searched the prison, cemetery, parish and national prison records without result.
The Esgos baptism record has led researchers to argue that Romasanta may have been born intersex. Torres Iglesias and Mariño Ferro, in 2007, pointed out that many trial witnesses described him as having marked feminine traits; that his nickname, Canicha, his manner and his work at women's tasks, even as a day laborer, were remarked on; that in prison he wore a muradana, a traditional garment, and covered his head with a kerchief; and that the doctors' measurements of his skull pointed, in modern terms, to a female cranium. They concluded that, while a parish priest's error could not be fully ruled out, everything suggested he was born a girl, and that the most likely explanation was a congenital adrenal condition.
The forensic doctor Fernando Serrulla has also raised the possibility that he was intersex, the Castro Vicente brothers noted in 2023. None of this was part of the trial, which treated him throughout as a man. These are modern hypotheses from the record, not findings.
Did Romasanta believe his story? His prosecutors thought he invented the curse to be declared insane and escape the garrote. Félix Castro Vicente told the Faro de Ceuta in 2011 that he claimed to be a werewolf to avoid execution and be sent to an asylum instead. Roberto Bustillo called it a stratagem "set up by a very intelligent person," noting that Romasanta could read and that similar claims had spared defendants in two French cases.
Torres Iglesias and Mariño Ferro, reviewing the case in 2007 with modern criteria, judged that the planning of the crimes, his intact memory of them and his grasp of reality ruled out psychosis or a dissociative disorder, and that the most likely diagnosis, with every reservation about applying modern categories two centuries later, was an antisocial personality disorder. They also observed that the werewolf, in Galician tradition a figure of violence and seduction, fit the man the record describes. Whether such a person should be held fully responsible, they wrote, is a question psychiatry and law still debate.
The case drew the attention of country people and city people alike, of the authors of popular ballads and of the journalists of the time, the 2007 study notes, and the trial's coverage in the international press was one of the topics of a 2023 university course on the case. It never left Galician memory.
Older retellings include the Galician writer Vicente Risco's essay on the case, published in 1971; the novel El bosque de Ancines by Carlos Martínez-Barbeito and Pedro Olea's film El bosque del lobo, both drawn from it; and O home do unto, a 1991 book by the journalist José Domínguez and Lino Blanco published by the Diputación de Ourense, later revised in an edition coordinated by Domínguez and Roberto Bustillo.
The story has also been retold as fiction. The novelist Alfredo Conde wrote Romasanta, published in Spanish as Memorias inciertas del hombre lobo (Destino, 2004), and gathered the research for Romasanta, a film directed by Paco Plaza for Filmax's Fantastic Factory label and released in 2004 (in English, Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt). Julian Sands played Romasanta and Elsa Pataky played Bárbara, a fictional woman who is both his victim and his executioner; the film is a gothic tale, not a reconstruction of the record. Luis Manuel García Mañán's 2023 novel In Articulo Mortis imagines the prison chaplain who attended him at Ceuta. In January 2026 Netflix announced Lobo, a miniseries produced by Vaca Films with Luis Tosar as Romasanta, written by Alberto Marini and Juan Galiñanes; filming had begun when it was announced.
Allariz has held an annual conference on the case, the Xornadas Romasanta, organized by the Fundación Vicente Risco. That 2023 course, at the national distance university's center in Ourense, also covered the broadsheet ballads about the case, the death in Ceuta and the crime sites. The researchers believe more remains may still be found in the Sierra de San Mamede, and that the records of Ceuta and of Chaves in Portugal are open lines of inquiry.
Proven by the courts: the killings of the nine people named in the indictment, for which he was sentenced to death at Allariz and, after review, served life. The bodies were never found; the case rested on his confession, the sale of the victims' belongings and the property he took.
Confessed but not proven: the deaths he described in the Vilariño de Conso area, which witnesses attributed to real wolves. El País in 2003 gave 13 confessed killings in all. The Faro de Ceuta in 2011 wrote that of 13 sometimes cited, five were supposedly killed by wolves.
Larger totals: a 2024 opinion column in the Diario de León said he killed 17 people and that the Allariz judge sentenced him for 17 while he admitted only nine, which does not match the court record described by the 2007 study. Such totals are not court findings.
Convicted in absentia but uncertain: the 1843 death of the León constable Vicente Fernández. The Ponferrada judgment was based on suspicion and his failure to appear, and the file is lost.
Suspected only: the deaths of the former servant of the prior of Rocas and of the peddler Manuel Ferreiro in the 1830s.
Not established: that he rendered human fat and sold it to pharmacies in Portugal. This was a rumor in the villages in 1851 that gave him the name home do unto; the Faro de Ceuta noted in 2011 that no evidence supports this version, and Ricardo Magaz wrote in 2024 that some researchers doubt any such trade went on. His statements about eating his victims were part of the confession built around the curse, which the courts rejected.
Not established: that he was a werewolf in any sense other than his own claim. The court's doctors found him sane and called the metamorphosis "a sarcasm."
Date and place of death: older accounts give 1854, in prison at Allariz or elsewhere in Galicia. The 1863 newspapers and the Esgos register place his death at Ceuta on December 14, 1863. Folk versions say he escaped and raised a family in Galicia, or that a guard shot him after he turned into a wolf; no evidence supports either.
Details that vary: the number of doctors (five in the 2007 study, six in Adiante Galicia); the archive number of the file (1788 in the 2007 study, 1778 in the Faro de Ceuta); and the date of his first known killing in León (1843, the constable's death, or 1844, the year of the judgment).
November 18, 1809: born in O Regueiro, Santa Olaia de Esgos, Ourense; baptized under the name Manuela.
About 1824: confirmed, recorded as Manuel (age 15 in the 2007 study).
March 3, 1831: marries Francisca Gómez Vázquez of Soutelo.
March 23, 1834: Francisca dies.
1834 and about 1835: rumors that he killed a peddler, Manuel Ferreiro, and a former servant of the prior of Rocas; never tried.
August 22, 1843: a León constable, Vicente Fernández, seizes his shop at Pardavé for debts.
August 25, 1843: the constable is found dead at Tremor de Abajo; Romasanta flees.
October 10, 1844: convicted in absentia at Ponferrada; ten years. Confirmed by the Audiencia of Valladolid in December.
About 1844 to 1845: settles in Rebordechao, Vilar de Barrio, as a day laborer.
March 30, 1846: takes Petra, 13; about eight days later, her mother Manuela García Blanco, 46. Neither is seen again.
March 1847: Benita García Blanco and her son Francisco, 9, leave with him.
Palm Sunday 1850: Antonia Rúa Carneiro and her daughter Peregrina, under 3, leave with him.
Autumn 1850: he takes Antonia's elder daughter, María Dolores, about 11.
November 1850: José Pazos, 21, leaves with him; he returns wearing José's cloak.
January 1, 1851: Josefa García Blanco, 49, leaves O Castro de Laza.
June and July 1851: the García Blanco family links him to Josefa's kerchiefs and knife; the home do unto rumor spreads.
October 20, 1851: leaves Rebordechao and goes into hiding.
February 1852: obtains a passport as Antonio Gómez.
July 2, 1852: recognized and arrested at Nombela, Toledo.
August 25, 1852: confesses before the judge of Verín and claims a curse turned him into a wolf.
August 28, 1852: Laza reports the García Blanco sisters cannot be found.
October 6, 1852: Audiencia of A Coruña concentrates the case at Allariz.
December 26, 1852: five doctors report that he is sane.
February 3, 1853: charges read for nine killings.
April 6, 1853: sentenced to death by garrote at Allariz.
May 7, 1853: review opens at the Audiencia of A Coruña.
July 24, 1853: the government forwards Philips's letter and orders any execution suspended.
November 9, 1853: Audiencia of A Coruña sentences him to life for illegal detention; the prosecutor appeals on November 14.
May 17, 1854: Isabella II's pardon reaches the Audiencia; on about May 20 a final death sentence is issued, commuted by the pardon to life.
October 7, 1854: enters the presidio of A Coruña.
1859: defense lawyer Manuel Rúa Figueroa publishes his summary of the case.
December 14, 1863: dies of stomach cancer in prison at Ceuta.
December 21 and 23, 1863: La Esperanza and La Iberia report his death.
December 16, 1864: anniversary Mass in Esgos, paid for by his brother Antonio.
1971: Vicente Risco's essay on the case published.
1991: O home do unto published by the Diputación de Ourense.
2004: Paco Plaza's film Romasanta released; Alfredo Conde's novel published.
October 2011: the Castro Vicente brothers present the Ceuta newspaper evidence.
2023: university course on the case in Ourense.
January 2026: Netflix announces the miniseries Lobo.