Sugar skull (calavera de azúcar)
A skull moulded from sugar and decorated with coloured icing, set on the ofrenda or given as a gift, often with a person’s name written across the forehead.
Meaning
Calaveras de azúcar, or calaveritas, are made of alfeñique, a sugar paste. Mexico’s former culture council, Conaculta, describes the traditional method: hot sugar with a little lemon is melted to a liquid, poured into a skull-shaped mould, and decorated by hand with coloured icing, rings around the eyes, spirals on the crown and a smile. A name goes across the top, the name of the person it is meant for; Conaculta reads this as a reminder that the one certainty in life is death. On the Ofrenda (altar), INPI writes, medium-sized skulls allude to death always present, small ones are dedicated to the Holy Trinity and a large one to God the Father, and children’s altars receive alfeñique animals, baskets of flowers, shoes and coffins. Today they are also made of amaranth or chocolate, and each state has its own way: peanuts or pumpkin seeds in Puebla, honey in the centre in Oaxaca, almond paste in the State of Mexico. Calavera is also the name of the satirical verses about death written for the season, which José Guadalupe Posada illustrated (see La Catrina).
Origin and history
Conaculta tells the sugar skull’s history as a meeting of two traditions. For the ancient Mesoamericans death was the end of one stage of life, which went on at another level, and skulls were kept as trophies and shown in rituals; the tzompantli was a row of the skulls of people sacrificed to the gods. After the conquest, rituals contrary to Catholic teaching were banned and, where people resisted giving them up, replaced. The coincidence between the Indigenous feasts of the dead and the Spanish All Souls’ Day allowed the change, and the sugar skull, in Conaculta’s account, is one such replacement, made with a technique the Spanish brought: alfeñique.
The record in Toluca is precise. The city council dates its earliest document to 1630, when the artisan Francisco de la Rosa asked permission to make alfeñique in his workshop on the Calle Real, now Avenida Independencia. It calls alfeñique a Spanish inheritance of Arab origin, and notes that a recipe was first printed in El cocinero mexicano in 1831. By 2020 Toluca’s Feria del Alfeñique had been held under the city’s Portales for more than 50 years; there the poured sugar skulls, dulce vaciado, are sold beside the alfeñique figures.
Read next
- Next in Day of the Dead symbolsLa CatrinaThe elegant skeleton lady of Día de Muertos. José Guadalupe Posada drew her as a skull in a flowered hat, first printed in 1913; Diego Rivera gave her a full body and a long dress in his mural of 1947.
- In Aztec symbols and godsMictlantecuhtliThe Aztec lord of Mictlan, the land of the dead to which most souls went. He is shown as a skeleton or half-fleshed body with a bare skull face, often with claws and a pleated paper rosette on his brow.
See also
Ofrenda (altar), Pan de muerto, Skeleton and skull, Cempasúchil (Mexican marigold), Papel picado, Copal.
Sources
- Las calaveritas de azúcar, una dulce tradición para el Día de Muertos (Conaculta, 2011), Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, news, 31 October 2011, Secretaría de Cultura (Gobierno de México), article text
- Alfeñique en Toluca, una dulce tradición viva desde hace 400 años (Ayuntamiento de Toluca, 2020), Ayuntamiento de Toluca, news, 21 October 2020, Ayuntamiento de Toluca, news text
- ¿Conoces el significado de los elementos de una ofrenda de Día de Muertos? (INPI), Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, article, Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (Gobierno de México), Las calaveras de azúcar; children’s altar
- La gráfica de José Guadalupe Posada, un legado para el patrimonio mexicano (Conaculta, 2012), Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, news, 20 January 2012, Secretaría de Cultura (Gobierno de México), paragraph on the calaveras
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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