{"id":795190,"date":"2026-10-07T20:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T20:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/795190\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T20:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T20:44:13","slug":"woman-raised-in-jungle-by-monkeys-for-7-years-reveals-what-she-ate-to-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/795190\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman raised in jungle by monkeys for 7 years reveals what she ate to survive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marina Chapman has told the extraordinary story of how she survived years alone in the Colombian<\/a> rainforest. Ms Chapman said she was just four when she was taken from her village<\/a> and abducted by trafficking gangs who then abandoned her deep within a Colombian rainforest<\/a>. She spent the following five years being raised by monkeys<\/a>. Now in her mid 70s, Ms Chapman remembers waking up in the rainforest and discovering a group of capuchin monkeys staring at her. At first, the animals kept their distance, but they gradually became more comfortable around her.<\/p>\n

She said the monkeys eventually began climbing onto her shoulders and playing with her hair, providing Ms Chapman with companionship during what was otherwise an incredibly lonely period of her childhood.<\/p>\n

She told OMG Stories Up Close<\/a> in a new interview: “That was a great comfort for me because I was feeling very isolated after so many months or days. I felt very solitary and for this animal to climb over my shoulders and stay there playing with my hair. That was really comforting for me when I was waiting for people to come for me. Nobody turned up.”<\/p>\n

Ms Chapman explained what she ate to survive. She said she survived by drinking plenty of water and eating seeds<\/a> and scraps left behind by the monkeys. In one of the most memorable sections of her autobiography she also describes how she got terrible food poisoning from tamarind and believed she was going to die.<\/p>\n

\"Marina<\/a><\/p>\n

Ms Chapman now lives in Bradford and has lived in Yorkshire for many years. (Image: Blink Films Ltd)<\/p>\n

Recalling the moment, she told OMG Stories Up Close: “I was just looking at this old monkey and I was really crying out and I was feeling very desperate. So he just walked towards me and he grabbed me forcefully and he pulled me into the water straight. It was a puddle of water, it wasn’t very deep. He put me there and he held me and I was just trying to push back.<\/p>\n

“I drank so much water and I was quite sick after until I looked at his face. He was staring at me. I realised something about his eyes, he didn’t want to kill me. I just thought there was something special about when I looked at his eyes. I felt he was a good monkey. He didn’t want to kill. But I felt better in my stomach after a while.”<\/p>\n

She gradually befriended the black and white capuchin primate monkeys.<\/p>\n

When asked about whether they felt like family to her, she said: “I felt like I was part of them because of the hands. They behave like a human.<\/p>\n

“I was shocked when I found a piece of mirror. It was a shock of my life because I didn’t realise about my face. It was the first time I saw my face. For me, I just thought, I am not like a monkey. I felt like I was related to them. I was beginning to feel a little bit confused. I don’t think I speak any language. I think I forgot my own language because I began to recognise the noises.”<\/p>\n

\"Marina<\/a><\/p>\n

Marina Chapman said she ate seeds and scraps left behind by monkeys. (Image: Blink Films\/Toby Trackman)<\/p>\n

After several years spent in the rainforest, hunters rescued her but by this point she had no human language. According to Ms Chapman, she was later sold to a brothel, then lived on the streets, before becoming a slave of a mafia family.<\/p>\n

A neighbour, Maruja, rescued her, Ms Chapman said. Maruja’s daughter, Maria, adopted Ms Chapman when she was about 14-years-old, and Maruja sent her to Bogota to live with one of her daughters.<\/p>\n

Her extraordinary story later attracted the attention of National Geographic, which created the documentary Woman Raised by Monkeys. The programme premiered on December 12, 2013. Ms Chapman also shared her life story in her autobiography, The Girl With No Name, which was published by Mainstream Publishing in 2013.<\/p>\n

This family had connections to Bradford through the textile industry. The family sent their children to Bradford in 1977 and sent Ms Chapman to be a nanny where she has now been living for several decades and has a family of her own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marina Chapman has told the extraordinary story of how she survived years alone in the Colombian rainforest. Ms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-795190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}