There is more life in the fog-bleached mountains of northern Portugal than the raptors wheeling overhead in search of rabbit and the invisible cows whose clanking bells ring out through the damp whiteness. The trick is finding it.
Along the hillside, piles of fresh manure signpost the way to one of the region’s most emblematic and endangered species. Before long, the curve of a dark brown neck rises from a nest of mossy rocks and winter-brown ferns. It belongs to a Garrano, an ancient breed of pony that has lived on the Iberian peninsula long enough to appear in paintings by both Palaeolithic artists and Diego Velázquez. Its strong, stocky build helped Portugal build and maintain its empire. Today, however, the Garrano is struggling to hold on.
After 16,000 years of domestication, the breed began to fall from favour in the middle of the 20th century as farms were mechanised and tractors and cars replaced horses. In the 1940s, there were between 40,000 and 60,000 Garranos in Portugal. Current estimates put the total population at 1,500-3,000.
“A horse needs a function,” says José Leite, a vet who serves as a technical adviser of the Association of Garrano Horse Breeders (Acerg). “Without it, they’re doomed to disappear. And that’s what was happening here. The need for the horse as an agricultural tool ended, and so this intensive breeding stopped, too.”
Acerg is trying to ensure the breed’s survival by highlighting its multifaceted potential: not only has the pony been valued as a hardy trekker since at least Roman times, it can also pull buggies, do dressage and is an ideal animal for novice riders.
“It’s about giving the breed back a purpose,” says Leite, “or finding a new one.”
In a country such as Portugal – which knows all too well the damage wildfires can do – the Garrano is now being pressed into service as a fire-prevention tool. Acerg has signed an agreement with Portugal’s largest electrical infrastructure company, REN, to provide 280 horses that will clear brush under pylons by grazing across 4,000 hectares of mountainside.
Michel Pereira, who has been beguiled by Garranos since he was 11, has been breeding the ponies for three decades and has 48 animals, many of which are now roaming the Serra da Cabreira. The wildfires of 2017, which killed more than 100 people in Portugal and Spain, reached one of his stables, devouring the plastic lining of its roof and bringing it down on the ponies beneath. Although the burned animals survived, the fire was a reminder of all that could be lost.
“Portugal would be a poorer country without these horses,” says the 55-year-old breeder. “It would be a great loss to Portugal and to all the families whose lives are bound up with Garranos.”
Obsolescence and the climate emergency are not the only threats the Garrano faces. The mountains of north-west Portugal are also home to around seven packs of Iberian wolves, comprising an estimated 30-40 animals. Like the ponies, the wolves have been in the area since the Palaeolithic period, and have been a protected species since 1988.
Garrano foals are rich and easy pickings for the wolves. Susana Lopes, a vet who joined Acerg eight years ago, says that wolves are killing up to 70% of the foals in some areas.
“If there aren’t too many wolves, the Garranos can do OK,” she says. “It’s OK if the wolves take the odd sick foal, but we’ve got to the point where … there’s no balance.”
The Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests (ICNF), the state body responsible for managing Portugal’s natural heritage, points out that wolves are protected by law, adding that the government pays compensation to farmers whose livestock are killed by the carnivores.
A spokesperson for the ICNF says the institute and its partners have launched a range of projects “to raise awareness among livestock farmers of the importance of conserving this large carnivore and to support them in implementing the most appropriate protection measures to prevent wolf attacks”.
Such programmes, she adds, include the use of traditional Portuguese livestock dogs and the building of fenced enclosures.
But the Garrano breeders argue that neither measure is suited to roaming ponies, and say the only sustainable way to address the attacks would be to introduce other animals for the wolves to eat, such as goats. In the meantime, many breeders are bringing their pregnant mares down from the mountains so they can give birth and raise their foals in safety.
Ariana Bezerra and her father, Fernando, have six Garranos on their farm on the outskirts of the ancient town of Ponte de Lima. Keeping them stabled, she says, is a mixed blessing.
“To protect the bloodlines and the foals, people like us keep their horses at home, but by doing that, you lose a lot of their wildness,” says Bezerra, as her father – who fell in love with the breed when he visited the local horse fair as a young boy – shows off his Garrano saddles and plies his visitors with bowlfuls of the wine he makes in a cellar beneath the stables.
“Losing the Garranos would be like having your heart broken and losing the pieces forever,” she says. “They’re not just part of Portugal’s history, they’re part of the world’s history.”
Leite says the breed’s disappearance would be the environmental equivalent of losing Lisbon’s famous Jerónimos monastery. What is more, he adds, if the ponies go, they could take their predators with them.
“We’d be losing all that very important genetic heritage,” he says. “And if the Garranos disappeared, the wolf packs in the mountains would disappear.”
