The "Fish-Man" of Liérganes, a legend from the North of Spain. Francisco de la Vega was born in Liérganes (Cantabria, North of Spain) in the middle of the seventeenth century. He was famous in the village since he was a child because of his extraordinary ability to swim. When he was sixteen, his mother sent him to Bilbao, a nearby city in the Basque Country, to learn the trade of carpenter. On the eve of the day of St. John (23 June) in 1674 he went to swim in the sea with other carpenters and swam until he disappeared. His friends thought he would come back, because he was an amazing swimmer, but that didn’t happen. In the end, they told his family that the rough Cantabrian Sea had “swallowed” him. Five years later, some fishermen in Cádiz (Andalusia, South of Spain) saw an aquatic being while they were fishing. They were surprised and afraid at the same time. The rumour spread quickly in the city and the fishermen thought about the best way to capture that creature. They used baits of meat and bread and big fishing nets and, after a few days, they managed to catch him. They were astonished at what they saw: he was a young man, tall and corpulent, with pale skin and red hair, but he had scales from the throat to the belly and on his back and he also had his fingers joined by a membrane. He didn’t speak but he roared like an animal. He was taken to a convent and stayed there for a while. He was interrogated by several language experts for three weeks and finally he could say a word: “Liérganes”. In the beginning that word didn’t make sense for them but, fortunately, in the convent there was a man from Santander, a city in Cantabria, and he confirmed that the word corresponded to a village from his region. Some messengers went there to look for information and they knew about the disappearance of Francisco in Bilbao five years earlier. When they returned to the convent and told the news, they decided to take him to Liérganes. As soon as he arrived in the village, he went directly to his mother’s house and his family recognized him immediately. Since then, he never showed any gesture of joy and spent his days in silence, eating raw meat and fish and lying face down on the floor. He wasn’t interested in anyone or anything. One day, two years later, he run towards the river, shouting desperately. Some farmers tried to stop him but he could escape from them and jump into the river, where he started to swim at high speed and disappeared. He was never found again.