Dressage in Portugal .... with Hidden Trails
... Article was published by CDCTA

The first week in February, my sister and I went to the Escola d’Equitacao at Alcainca, outside Lisbon, in Portugal, for a week of intense dressage training.

Unlike the summer, Portugal in February is very green, a sweatshirt is all you need to keep warm. The food is simple but good, bread and cheese and fruit for breakfast, meat for lunch and fish for supper, all with coffee and some really good desserts.

There is an indoor ring (much smaller than it looks- only 12.5 meters wide) and a much larger outdoor ring.  Half of the outdoor is covered, which helped when it rained.  The indoor was at the end of a major renovation- they were installing the lights the day after we arrived- with a new roof, new kickboards, and so on.  There are a number of azulejos (Portuguese blue and white tiles) of classical horsemanship decorating the indoor, and the stables.

The routine consists of two lessons, each an hour and a half, each day, one at 10:30 and one at 3 PM.  Most of the lessons started with longing in a chambon, to get the horses using their backs.  This is apparently particularly important with the less skilled riders, to protect the horse’s backs from damage..

The horses there are Lusitanos (mostly stallions, but a few geldings) trained through the upper levels (including piaffe and passage), but tolerant enough to put up with the less skilled aids of riders with widely varying expertise.  As usual with school horses, you sometimes have to overemphasize the aids at first, in order to “get through “ to them.  But once you break through the resistance, they become much lighter and more responsive. I found it much easier to get to this point than the last time I went, 6 years ago.

Almost all the horses are ridden in double bridles, but we primarily rode off the snaffle rein.  We kept the curb rein slightly looser, but not “looping”. Spurs and whip were also standard.

The primary focus of most of the lessons was keeping the horse straight.  In order to do that, you needed to distinguish between bending at the poll, in the neck, and in the body.   You also needed to become very aware of the relative positions of the shoulders and the quarters. Much of the lesson consisted of “straight the neck”,  “more flexion (at the poll)”, “more bend”, counteracting the tendency to bend too much at the neck.

The lessons included LOTS of lateral work, leg yield, shoulder in, haunches in,  counter- shoulder in, and half pass.  Some lessons included work on flying changes.   Then we progressed (especially later in the week) to Spanish walk, passage and piaffe.  These are horses that are built for piaffe and passage, and they learn it in hand when they are quite young, so they are quite willing to do it if you “get it right”.  The hardest part was keeping my balance centered in the piaffe, so I didn’t tip from side to side.

At the end of the week (though they didn’t tell me ahead of time), I got to be the “guinea pig” for Napolitano, who was just coming back into the role of school horse, after a few months off, and being ridden only by the instructors.  Before that, he had completely ignored all the students, just standing still in the middle of the ring and refusing to move.  I was the first student to ride him following his “rehab”, and he behaved very well for me.

On the last day, we spent the afternoon in a Portuguese tack store, and the evening in Lisbon, where we had a good time window shopping (I did buy some Quejo de Serra (cheese)) and a very good dinner.  We had an early flight the next morning, back to Virginia and work.

Janet Gunn, VA