Esgrima Criolla (Gaucho Knife Fighting)
The gaucho knife fighting of Argentina and Uruguay. The aim of a duel was not to kill but to mark the opponent with a scar on the face.
Quick Facts
Character & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Esgrima Criolla (Gaucho Knife Fighting)
Esgrima criolla is the gaucho knife fighting of Argentina and Uruguay. It has no founder and no year of origin — it is the custom of a herding society, not a founded school. Its documented beginning lies in the late eighteenth century in the Banda Oriental, that is present-day Uruguay, and its peak came in the first half of the nineteenth century during the Argentine wars of independence and the internal conflicts that followed. The principal weapon is the facón, a long knife with a blade of thirty to forty centimetres, single-edged and with a crossguard; it was often made from bayonets and sword blades. It was worn at the waist and served for work as well as for fighting. Beside it stands the daga, with a shorter double-edged blade, which came to the fore later in the urban setting because it fitted into a jacket pocket. The other hand holds the poncho, used to cover, to deceive and to entangle the opponent's blade. Training was done without blood. Visteo means practice built on reading the opponent's movement, in which a stick or greased fingers replaced the knife, so that a hit left a mark rather than a wound. The canchada was a marked-out space in which advancing and retreating were practised without losing position. The duel had unwritten rules, and they are the most interesting thing about esgrima criolla. The aim was not to kill but to mark: victory meant a visible wound on the face, the so-called barbijo, running from the cheekbone to the mouth. The first serious blood decided, and a death was regarded as an accident rather than a murder. In the later nineteenth century the tradition moved into the cities and into tango; today it is kept up by traditionalist groups.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.