A wooded islet near Goya, Corrientes, was said to change position and frighten anyone approaching it with strange noises and infernal inhabitants. Juan B. Ambrosetti recorded the Isla del Diablo legend alongside a possible natural origin: a floating mass of vegetation entering an old Paraná channel. His account preserves a local story and competing interpretations, rather than a measured moving island or a verified exorcism.
Which Isla del Diablo?
The source is Supersticiones y leyendas, 1917, printed pages 123–124. Ambrosetti places this islet about a league east of Goya in Argentina’s Corrientes province. That description identifies the locality associated with his account, but does not provide a survey, coordinates or a modern parcel identity.
The name should not be used to merge it with other places called Devil’s Island. Nor does the reviewed passage establish that a particular modern tourist island around Goya is the same place. The historical reference is retained without inventing an exact island identification.
A moving, inhabited islet
In the legend, the islet had no fixed resting place. It might be found farther north one morning and farther south another. The inhabitants were described as infernal spirits making threatening gestures and strange noises when someone tried to approach.
The source supplies no dated sequence of positions, named observer of the movements or record of an island being tracked against a fixed bank. The north-and-south movement is a feature of the transmitted story. It does not establish that a rooted mass of land travelled as described.
A missionary friar then supposedly arrived, carried out religious ceremonies and blessed the islet. After that, it was said to remain still. The account gives neither the friar’s name nor the date of the ceremony. The story’s before-and-after structure is clear, but its physical cause cannot be tested from those details.
The explanation attributed to Bonpland
Ambrosetti identifies Tomás Mazzanti, an old Goya resident, as his informant for a different interpretation. According to Mazzanti, the naturalist Aimé Bonpland thought that the islet had once been a large embalsado, a floating vegetation formation, which entered through a Paraná branch formerly present there.
This is an attributed opinion transmitted through Mazzanti and Ambrosetti. The passage does not reproduce a Bonpland field note or say that Ambrosetti watched the original floating mass arrive. Naming a respected naturalist does not transform that source chain into a directly documented observation.
An anchor story was offered in support. A plant was allegedly uprooted and a three-pronged small anchor found beneath it, thought to be Spanish. Mazzanti assured Ambrosetti that he had seen this anchor in a boatman’s possession in 1860.
Those statements need to remain separate. Seeing an anchor in someone’s possession would not by itself establish where it had been found, its age, the identity of an island or the date of an earlier drifting event. The reviewed source supplies no inspected specimen, drawing or independent archaeological context. The year 1860 therefore does not date the island’s alleged movements.
A real natural phenomenon, with limits
Floating vegetation formations are not merely a folkloric idea. In a 2018 field study of Río de la Plata vegetation rafts, Guerrero and colleagues documented transported plant assemblages, including embalsado material with soil and roots. They describe embalsados as floating islands of plant debris and mud held by vegetation, usually formed in sheltered water and only rarely carried by currents.
That research supplies independent evidence for the kind of natural formation invoked in the historical explanation. It concerns other sites and a different period, however. It does not identify the Goya islet, confirm the anchor’s provenance or demonstrate that Bonpland’s reported explanation was correct.
Ambrosetti’s additional interpretation
Ambrosetti favoured a natural origin, but also suggested that transmitted belief, optical effects and the force of the missionary ceremony influenced how people perceived the island. He offered no measured optical reconstruction or documented test of those ideas. His confidence is an element of the historical interpretation, not proof that every part of the story has been explained.
He further asserted that the wooded place had sheltered bandits before the vegetation was heavily reduced. The passage does not provide named incidents or independent records supporting that claim. It therefore cannot be used to identify criminals as the authors of the noises or to establish a deliberate haunting hoax.
Assessment and map reference
The outcome is Possibly Explained as a landscape legend with a plausible floating-vegetation proposal. The formation of real embalsados supports the physical possibility of vegetation moving on water. The absence of a confirmed island identity, direct tracking or reliable artefact provenance prevents a demonstrated explanation of this particular story.
The record is still useful because it preserves the location described by an identifiable collector, the narrative of the blessing and a named informant’s account of an alternative explanation. These elements should remain attributed rather than being expanded into an undocumented incident history.
The map uses an approximate Goya town-area reference, −29.14, −59.26, from the GeoNames populated-place record. Ambrosetti’s unlocated islet was described as about a league east of the town; the pin is not the island, a recovered anchor site or a modern visitor attraction. No current public access to the historical islet has been verified.
The movement and blessing remain undated, so the incident-year list is empty. Mazzanti’s reported 1860 view of an anchor, the 1917 book and the later scientific study are different kinds of dates and do not create additional encounters. The case belongs to the Goya area of Corrientes, Argentina, with the current America/Argentina/Cordoba time zone.