Dragons and serpents occupy such a prominent place in the popular imagination —both in oral tradition and in the literature it has inspired— that it is impossible to contain them within a single paragraph. Their meanings are not always malevolent, but they are very often dangerous.

They are guardians of hidden gold and sacred places, watching with a fixed, vertical gaze that never closes its eyelids; the worm that gnaws day after day at the roots of the world; the typhoon that devastates the village with vast wings and sharpened claws; the Setian master who tempts, hypnotises and subjugates before you even realise what is happening; the oracle that reveals the hidden mysteries of the gods. They have been sung as embodiments of the fate that comes seeking the Germanic warrior, as ancestral images of the waters from which everything emerges and to which everything returns, and as monstrous maidens pursuing a jewel stolen through deceit. And the serpent may also be the guardian spirit of a lineage, rising from the great sea, as in the fascinating magical folktale of the Serpent collected by Maspons.

What more can we say? The serpent, the dragon, the typhoon, the irresistible telluric river: this is one of our favourite figures in the traditional folklore of Catalonia and the wider world. For that reason, we have given it a category of its own, separate from beasts, the dead, demons and fairies, though it travels much of the same road as all of them.