A personal perspective, from a life of breeding

I have spent my whole life alongside the Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino. I grew up among them, learned to ride on their backs, and have spent decades breeding them, first in Puerto Rico, and now in the United States. I write about this breed because I know it, because I love it, and because each passing year leaves fewer horses to carry it forward. I want more people to know what it is, why it is unique, and why it is worth conserving.

I am speaking, first of all, to the “purists”: to those who know and love this breed, and who from their farms, paddocks, associations, and families make the effort to conserve it. I am also speaking to the horse people who love horses without labels, with honest curiosity and a genuine desire to know them for what they are. I write from my own experience, from a life surrounded by this noble and singular animal, and without claiming the voice or the thinking of the institutions I belong to or share this same concern with.

A gait the horse is born with

The Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino is known, before anything else, by its gait. It is a lateral, four-beat gait, so even and so quick that the ear can barely follow it, and so smooth that the rider can carry a glass filled to the brim without spilling a drop. What is remarkable is that this gait is not taught: the foal brings it at birth, an inheritance written into its blood by centuries of selection. It is, above all, a saddle horse —comfortable, noble, sure-footed— bred to carry its rider for long hours over any terrain. From that same stock comes its versatility: the very horse that shines in an exhibition can ride the beach, work cattle, cross a mountain trail, compete in agility events, or bring back to the saddle someone an injury had forced out of it.

A five-century inheritance

The horse is not native to the Americas; Spain brought it. The first ones reached Puerto Rico around 1509, of Iberian and Barb stock, the same that served the Conquest. When the demand for war horses passed, the island’s breeders —from the great landowner to the humble jíbaro— turned their effort toward another end: a comfortable, sure-footed horse for the mountain trails. Generation after generation, through selection, they fixed a way of going that existed nowhere else. By 1797 a French naturalist —André-Pierre Ledrú— already marveled at those horses with “a gait so hasty that the most attentive eye cannot follow the movement of their legs;” by 1860 the historian Adolfo de Hostos recorded that on the island breeders had produced “a breed known by the name of Paso Fino Horse, much admired in the Antilles;” and in 1943 its first formal breed registry was established. It is the oldest horse breed in the Caribbean, and one of the oldest developed in the Americas.

What makes it unique

Science has come to confirm what breeders knew from experience. Its genome places it close to the Iberian horse Spain brought five centuries ago: it is one of the truest living witnesses to that type of horse, as the geneticist Gus Cothran, of Texas A&M University, concluded. And it carries a mark that appears in no other breed in the world: the tiger eye, an amber or honey-colored iris that on the island they call “ojos de cabro,” produced by a mutation that science has so far found only in the Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino. It is, in the horse, what the “mancha de plátano” (“plantain stain,” the jíbaro’s colloquial phrase for the indelible stamp of being Puerto Rican) is in a person: a signature of the soil that saw it born. Puerto Rico has declared it National and Cultural Heritage, and for its rarity and its value it could one day be considered patrimony of humanity.

A breed on the edge

All that richness rests today on very few horses. There is no formal census, but it is estimated that between 1,500 and 1,800 remain on the island and fewer than 400 in the continental United States, and the number falls with each passing year. The Livestock Conservancy lists it as a threatened breed, and the Equus Survival Trust at its most critical level. A population this small depends, for its survival, on being known and understood: the horse the public cannot tell apart is the horse no one protects.

Each breed by its own name

The name “Paso Fino” was born in Puerto Rico, to name this singular horse. Over the years, other gaited breeds took it up, until it became almost a general term. My view, as a breeder, is simple, and it holds equally for everyone: each breed deserves to be called by its own name. Let the Colombian horse be the Colombian Paso Fino, the American one the American Paso Fino, and ours the Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino. Clarity in names also guides the buyer: anyone seeking a horse should know precisely which breed they are acquiring, what history it represents, what registries stand behind it, and what to expect from it. It is a necessary courtesy that helps everyone, and the most vulnerable most of all, because it gives the breed back its own face.

Sister breeds, not a single breed

Every so often the idea of a “Paso Fino of the Americas” resurfaces, proposing that all the gaited horses of Spanish origin form a single great breed, with variants by country. It is an appealing idea, but history and science show otherwise. The mutation associated with alternative gaits is shared by many gaited breeds around the world; having it does not make them one breed, any more than two people are siblings for sharing the color of their eyes. What sets one breed apart from another is the path each people walked in breeding it. The Puerto Rican, the Colombian, and the Peruvian horses have been bred separately for centuries, each on its own land and toward its own ideal, and that separation leaves its mark. The geneticist Ángel Custodio González explains it with a clear example: forty years of isolation between the horses of East and West Germany were enough for genetic analysis to recognize them as distinct populations. That is why, when the full genome is studied, the Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino stands as a group apart on the phylogenetic tree. Sisters in their Spanish origin; each one whole and distinct in what it became.

There will always be those who keep using that classification because they find it convenient, and others who, even knowing the evidence, would rather not revisit it. This text is not written for them, but for those who genuinely wish to understand the history of each breed, and why naming them clearly is also a way of respecting them.

Conserving it

Conserving a breed like this calls for walking several paths at once. Caring for its genetic diversity, today one of its greatest challenges. Preserving the bloodlines and the traits that define it, through responsible breeding and reliable records. Promoting it for what it is —showing it, riding it, bringing it before the public— so that more people discover it. And teaching honestly what makes it distinct, because we protect only what we understand. Above all, it needs successors: young breeders who take up the knowledge and carry it forward, as has been done for centuries, from one generation to the next.

I believe in the versatile horse: for the show ring, for pleasure riding, and for work; I believe in cooperation among breeders of every breed; and in educating the public with clarity. And I believe, with equal force, in honoring the identity of our singular breed.

In closing

Awilda Colón Iguina, one of the great horsewomen of our golden age, used to say that “the Paso Fino horse is as much ours as the ceiba, the yuca, or the coquí.” She was right. It is five centuries of history inscribed in the genome of an animal: the Iberian horse of the Conquest, the quiet work of generations of breeders, the town festivals where a rider held a glass of water without spilling it. To conserve it is a debt owed to all of that, and to those who will inherit it.

The Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino is best appreciated from the saddle. If you have never ridden one, find a farm near you and ask. The day you feel that smoothness, you will understand why there are people who devote their whole lives to keeping this horse from being lost.

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A note on sources

This text draws on foundational works on the Puerto Rican Paso Fino horse—Laracuente, Ruiz Cestero, and Gaztambide Arrillaga—; on historical sources from Hostos and Ledrú; on genetic and animal-science studies by Custodio González, Cothran, Wolfsberger et al., and Mack et al.; and on the conservation classifications of The Livestock Conservancy and the Equus Survival Trust.