attacks innocent children. Artists illustrating these books depicted the Cuca as an anthropomorphic alligator. She is an allusion to Coca, a dragon from the folklore of Portugal and Galicia. Heads Traditionally in Portugal, however, the coco is represented by an iron pan with holes, to represent a face, with a light inside; or by a vegetable lantern carved from a pumpkin with two eyes and a mouth, which is left in dark places with a light inside to scare people. In the Beiras, heads carved on pumpkins, called coca, would be carried by the village boys, stuck on top of wooden stakes. The same name [Coca] is given to the pumpkin perforated with the shape of a face, with a candle burning in the inside—this gives the idea of a skull on fire—that the boys on many lands of our Beira carry stuck on a stick. An analogous custom was first mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (XIII.56.5;57.3), in which Iberian warriors, after the battle of Selinunte, in 469 BC, would hang the heads of the enemies on their spears. According to Rafael López Loureiro, this carving representation would be a milenar tradition from the Celtiberian region that spread all over the Iberian Peninsula. The autumnal and childish custom of emptying pumpkins and carving on its bark, eyes, nose and mouth looking for a sombre expression, far from being a tradition imported by a recent Americanizing cultural mimicry, is a cultural trait in ancient Iberian Peninsula. This representation would be related to the Celtic cult of the severed heads in the Iberian peninsula. According to João de Barros, the name of the "coconut" derived from coco and was given to the fruit by the sailors of Vasco da Gama, c.1498, because it reminded them of this mythical creature. This bark from which the pome receives its vegetable nourishment, which is through its stem, has an acute way, which wants to resemble a nose placed between two round eyes, from where it throws the sprout, when it wants to be born; by reason of such figure, it was called by our [men] coco, name imposed by the women on anything they want to put fear to the children, this name thus remained, as no one knows another. Rafael Bluteau (1712) observes that the coco and coca were thought to look like skulls, in Portugal: Coco or Coca. We make use of these words