AbstractWe study the formation of singularities of smooth solutions to the relativistic Euler equations of Chaplygin gases in Schwarzschild spacetime. The system is in the spherically symmetric form, and its coefficients and nonhomogeneous terms contain a parameter reflecting the mass of the black hole, which makes it highly nonlinear and complicated. To overcome the influence of the mass parameter of black hole, we introduce a pair of suitable auxiliary variables related to it and derive their characteristic decompositions to establish the estimates of the smooth solution. We show that, for a kind of initial data, the smooth solution develops singularity in finite time and the mass‐energy density itself approaches infinity at the blowup point.