Mitos y Leyendas: The Birth of Flowers According to the Tehuelches

• Mitos y Leyendas brings you the story of the birth of flowers in the world according to the Tehuelches.
• Long ago, plants did not have flowers, but thanks to a beautiful, curious young girl, petals were created.
• Once again, the ancestral tribes show us a different way of viewing the world we have.

A very long time ago, in an era when plants lacked flowers and the earth was still in its early days, there lived a Tehuelche young woman named Kospi.

She possessed a unique beauty, with soft hair that waved in the wind and black eyes like the night, which seemed like star twinkles in the midst of darkness.

It was on a stormy afternoon, when lightning illuminated the earth as if it were daytime, that Karut, the thunder, saw her from the entrance of her parents’ tent.

Despite being a rustic and rough figure, he fell deeply in love with the young woman.

Karut kidnaps the young woman

Fearing that Kospi would reject him, Karut kidnapped her and fled with her, disappearing from the view of her worried parents like a bolt in the night.

He took her to the high and snowy Andes, where he hid her at the bottom of a glacier that seemed to have been sculpted by the gods themselves.

Kospi’s sadness and suffering gradually transformed her into a block of ice, which merged with the glacier, becoming an eternal part of the mountain.

Some time later, Karut wanted to visit his beloved and, upon discovering her disappearance, was filled with heart-wrenching fury.

Kospi emerges in the plants

His cries of desperation resonated through the sky and attracted dark clouds that began to rain incessantly over the glacier, melting it completely.

The resulting water rushed down the mountain in a forceful torrent, then flowed through the green valleys, nourishing the earth and giving it life.

With the arrival of spring, Kospi’s heart longed to feel the sunlight, the warm embrace of the wind, and the beauty of the starry sky on clear nights.

So, she gracefully climbed up the roots and stems of the plants, emerging her beautiful head in the form of colorful petals that seemed to have captured the essence of her beauty.

The birth of flowers

Thus, flowers were born, filling the world with colors and fragrances, and making everything more cheerful and beautiful.

This is why, since then, the Tehuelches have called the petals of flowers «Kospi,» in honor of the young woman who became the mother of the beauty of nature.

The Tehuelches, like other ancestral peoples, have an incredible way of conceiving the origin of things that is worthy of being shared and known to appreciate and respect the planet more.

Mitos y Leyendas bids you farewell for now and hopes you liked this story about the birth of flowers. See you next time!