Since March, a video has been circulating on various social media platforms alleging that a dragon has been found at Kwahu in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
The one-minute video, featuring narration in Twi, reports the discovery of a live dragon in Kwahu. The narration continues that the government expresses concern over the potential negative impacts on Easter festivities in the area, as it is known as a vacation destination during the holiday season.
A page on Tiktok, for instance, called Frimpskay Media posted the video on March 6, 2024. The caption on the video said “A huge dragon found alive on the Kwahu mountains”.
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As of the time of this publication, the claim had garnered over 2.5 million views, 118.900 likes, 3,257 comments, 12.400 bookmarks, and 6,711 shares. The video is widely shared across different platforms including Facebook, X formerly Twitter, and WhatsApp (here and here).
In this report, Fact-Check Ghana presents findings from its verification of this video.
To authenticate and verify the origin of the video, keyframes generated by Online Converter were subjected to reverse image search using Yandex.
The search found that a similar video was posted on the YouTube channel, Familia este totul with the title “Juan Villa Herrero artist create fake dragon”. The video was published on September 13, 2016.
The YouTube video titled “Creating a Dragon for the Cuarto Milenio” has a description in Spanish that reads: “This is how we created step by step in our workshop a Dragon of more than 4 meters for the TV show, Cuarto Milenio”.
According to GabeHashTV, another YouTube page that came up in the search, Juan Villa Herrero is a . Juan created the dragon sculpture to promote “Cuarto Milenio” a program covering topics like science, crime, and the paranormal. It took Juan one week to build the dragon, which was made from latex and flexible foam, the TV channel said.
Further searches on Juan Villa Herrero’s YouTube channel revealed a video he posted on February 21, 2016, about the process of creating the dragon model. The video, originally in Spanish, has a title translated into English as “Creating a dragon for Cuarto Milenio” using Google Translate. Its description states: “This is how we created step by step in our workshop a dragon of more than 4 meters for the television program Cuarto Milenio.” Once again, the team translated it using Google Translate.
Juan again published another video on his YouTube channel on, February 25, 2016, related to the creation process of the dragon sculpture. The translated version of the caption of the video from Spanish to English reads: “So we made the fake dragon.” The dragon model featured in this video is the same as the one seen in the misleading TikTok post.
Other fact-checking organisations have also debunked the claim of this dragon video here, here, and here
In conclusion, the circulating video depicting a real dragon in Kwahu is merely a sculpture created for the television program Cuarto Milenio in Spain and not a live dragon in Kwahu, Eastern Region of Ghana.
