A decade ago, Alex Bentley, a young American scientist, traveled to the small Ecuadorean town of Mera to study an elusive species of snake known as the “X.” During his visit, a local park ranger mentioned an old man who had an extraordinary collection of snakes.
Arriving at a shack on the old man’s property, Bentley was greeted by a sign announcing admission prices of $1 for adults and 50 cents for children. Anthurium flowers and tropical evergreen plants lined the outside. He paid the dollar and stepped into a dusty small building with white lattice walls and a corrugated metal roof.
Inside, dozens of dead snakes, coiled in plastic bottles and glass jars, lined wooden shelves. The specimens, rare and obscure, drifted in a cane liquor that had clouded over the decades.
They were like a “little hidden treasure,” Bentley recalled, “something that had just been overlooked.” The jars held massive snakes and species even Bentley couldn’t name, in a menagerie that stretched back 70 years.
What captivated him even more was the collector: Manuel Genaro Peñafiel, a slight, mustachioed farmer who lived in the white house next door and had transformed the shack into a makeshift museum.
Peñafiel, then 90 years old, had spent a lifetime catching snakes on his finca, his rural estate, frequently risking fatal bites. His shelves held everything from thin whip snakes to the equis, the lethal pit viper whose hourglass markings give the “X” its name.
In a region where the customary response to a snake was a machete, Bentley was puzzled: Why had Peñafiel kept them at all?
It was difficult, Bentley admitted, to articulate his own obsession with these misunderstood creatures. But here was a farmer with no scientific training who had the same response. There was an immediate companionship between the two men — a shared connection over what Bentley described as “the calling of the snakes.”
