Guacharaca


The guacharaca is a percussion instrument, usually made from the trunks of small palm trees. It’s essentially a tube with ridges carved into the surface, scraped with a wire fork. The Tairona indigenous people, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on Colombia’s northern coast, invented the guacharaca to simulate the singing of the guacharaca bird and the instrument now represents the indigenous side of vallenato and cumbia, alongside European and West African influences. A guacharaca player is known as a guacharaquero.