Whence
Bolas criollas (the creole boules game)
Game

Where does Bolas criollas (the creole boules game) come from?

Bolas criollas comes from Venezuela, where it is loved across the Llanos and the countryside. Two teams take turns rolling big red and green balls on an earth court, trying to stop them as close as possible to a small iron ball, the mingo.

A game from colonial times

The game's ancestors are Europe's boules games. A Venezuelan government sports profile says the first precise reports tell of a Spanish friar who brought it to Venezuela during the Spanish conquest. At first people played with balls of very hard woods such as vera and guayacán, and to tell the teams apart they painted a cross on one side's balls and left the others plain. The game grew truly popular from the 1930s, and it is now one of the great symbols of llanero culture.

Mingo, arrime and boche

The court is a level rectangle of packed earth, sand or clay, ideally about 20 by 30 metres, with a fence of logs or boards. Teams of two have eight heavy balls each. One player throws the mingo, no more than 5 cm across, and then the teams take turns, throwing palm down. An arrime is a gentle roll that comes to rest by the mingo; a boche is a hard throw that knocks away an opponent's ball. The first team to 20 points wins.

Why people think of Italy or France

Bolas criollas looks much like Europe's boules games, such as bocce and pétanque, so many people guess Italy or France. Its roots do lie in Europe's old boules games, but in Venezuela it grew into a sport of its own. In 1956 the Venezuelan Federation of Bolas Criollas was founded, led by Lorenzo Rivas, a dentist and keen player. That same year a meeting in Lara state gathered all the existing rulebooks and merged them into the first official one.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · es.wikipedia.org ↗ · web.archive.org ↗

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