and 10 years. 23 horses were brought from the east and a similar number came from Poland. Other expeditions were organized to these same places between 1908 and 1912, and that was when the three pillars from Spanish breeding, Ursus, Wan Dyck and Seanderich, were imported from Poland and from the Desert. Through them, many were the horses bred by the Yeguada Militar whose influence has crossed the years; especially the three notable stallions Galero, Garbo and Jacio.
The Duke of Veragua with Cadiz.
“My uncle watched the male horses every morning in Madrid, and then hired a car almost every afternoon to take him to Valjuanete,” says Piedad Colon de Carvajal, Marquesa de Avella, Duke de Veragua’s niece. “Sometimes we accompanied our uncle on these trips, and whenever we commented on the beauty of this horse or that, his immediate answer was, ‘God bless him!’ We teased him a lot about this, because he never blessed us!” Another invaluable legacy of Spanish breeding to the world was the stud of Valjuanete, founded by the Duke of Veragua in 1920. A direct descendent of Christopher Columbus and considered by Lady Wentworth to be one of the biggest authorities in the breed, the Duke of Veragua purchased stock from several origins, inside and outside of Spain, but the horses that he bought at Crabbet Park, specially the five daughters of Skowronek, were the ones that became immortalized in the pages of history. His stallion Razada, also from England, was the sire of Nana Sahib, another pillar of Spanish breeding. Despite the total destruction of the farm along with the Duke’s assassination during the Spanish civil war, the breeding of Valjuanete managed to survive due to some animals that were not found right away by General Francisco Franco, and thanks to that, some of the original lines are still found in the present day. Despite the fact that all of the horse records were burned, the V mark done with fire, carried by these surviving horses, served as a guarantee of their purity, and is accepted by the entire world. It is the case of the famous mare Estopa, the mother of El Shaklan, a direct descendant of one of the Duke de Veragua’s mares. n
The Duke’s stallion, Razada, 1930.
Ar abian Horse Times | 123 | Volume 47, No. 5A A