Witchcraft is a fundamental part of folklore throughout the world and has an especially powerful presence in Catalonia and across Europe — so much so that it is difficult to find a village without one or many legends, a place-name, a spring or a forest recalling witches and sorcerers. Since time immemorial, the oral traditions of cultures around the world have imagined “witches”: enemies of the community who work secretly to destroy it, forming a parallel society on its margins, hating and undermining it. Each of these figures belongs to the particular beliefs, region and age that gave them form.

Here you will also find tales of necromancers who raise the dead and enslave demons, ogres and giants who wield terrible magic, and mysterious wanderers who bestow magical objects capable of saving or condemning those who receive them. In short, these are stories in which dangerous and malevolent witchcraft — the dark arts in their broadest sense — plays a central role. Neither here nor elsewhere in Llegendàrium, however, do we deal with historical events or real individuals accused of witchcraft. Our subject is witchcraft as it exists in the popular imagination: in folktales, legends and other forms of oral tradition.