In Inca mythology, Amaru was a great serpent or dragon associated with water, rivers, and earthquakes.
Amaru is often represented as a two-headed serpent, sometimes with features borrowed from other powerful animals. Accounts and later interpretations connect it with underground waters, springs, rivers, fertility, and the forces that move beneath the earth. In Andean religious art, serpent imagery frequently expresses a link between the underworld, the earth, and the sky.
The Inca world was not organized around a single standardized dragon story in the way some later popular retellings suggest. Amaru instead belongs to a wider Andean symbolic tradition, and descriptions vary across regions and sources. Colonial writers also recorded Indigenous beliefs through European categories, which can make the word “dragon” an imperfect translation.
Amaru should not be confused with Viracocha, the creator deity, or Supay, a powerful underworld figure. Its strongest recurring associations are serpentine form, water, fertility, and subterranean power.