Right on cue, after the Guadalajara Reporter’s front page story last week on weather phenomena in the Lake Chapala region, a waterspout snaked down from a giant black cloud bank hovering over the water early Tuesday, August 9.
Dozens of early risers caught sight of the funnel cloud as it lingered in the morning sky between 8:30 and 9 a.m.
The waterspout, known in the Spanish vernacular as a tromba de agua or culebra, was observed by both north and south shore inhabitants of the municipalities of Chapala, Jocotepec and Tuxcueca. Many of the amazed sky-watchers captured photo and video images on cell phones, that quickly went viral through shares on social networks and news media sites.
The waterspout gradually dissipated at mid-water, without touching down over the neighboring mountain ranges or causing damages on adjacent land.
Through centuries of local history, culebras rising from Lake Chapala, often in pre-dawn hours, have unleashed a number of natural disasters in lakeshore communities, most recently on October 5 of last year when debris slides tumbled down from the mountains overlooking Ajijic and San Juan Cosalá. Previous landslide incidents of recent memory struck Ajijic in 1988, San Juan Cosalá in 1997, and San Juan again in 2007, and Jocotepec’s Senderos del Lago subdivision in 2020.
Perhaps the most devastating tromba on record here occurred in the early hours of July 8, 1973 in Poncitlán on the north shore’s east end, where at least 32 inhabitants were killed, dozens more injured and 1,150 people displaced from their ruined homes.
An ancient custom local people once practiced to quell culebras springing from the lake entailed waving a machete or knife in the air, making the sign of the cross to slice apart and slaughter the watery beasts before they struck land.