Puerto Rico · 1493 to now
Twenty horses and five mares came ashore on the west coast in 1493. Nothing much came in after them. Five hundred years later the animal those horses turned into moves in a way no one on earth taught it. This is that story, in order.
Five hundred and thirty years
Turned out on an island nobody had fenced
1493 to 1600s · The first horses
On 19 November 1493 the second voyage of Columbus reached the west coast of an island its people called Borinquen. Puerto Rican accounts of the landing record twenty horses and five mares put ashore at the bay of Aguada, and the region given the name San Juan Bautista.
Which beach exactly is still argued over. Aguada, Aguadilla, Añasco and Rincón have all claimed it, and all four are a short drive down the coast from Hacienda Los Ponce in Isabela.
The horses were Iberian and they were not one type. The Spanish Jennet brought a smooth lateral amble it already had. The Barb, out of north Africa, brought stamina and hard feet. The Andalusian brought carriage, and the mane and tail that nobody has trimmed since.
In May 1509 Juan Ponce de León, the island's first governor, shipped more over from his hacienda El Higüey on La Española, and the horses went to work: cane in the lowlands, cattle, and everything that had to be carried. Nobody involved was breeding a Paso Fino. They were breeding horses that could work. The gait arrived as luggage.
1600s to 1790s · Alone on an island
The population bred largely among itself and the island did the selecting. Mountains, mud, coffee terraces and distance sorted the horses that lasted from the horses that did not. Smoothness was never a show quality here. It was a working requirement, because a hacienda needed a horse a man could ride all day and still be able to get off.
We can now read what those two centuries did. A single mutation in a gene called DMRT3, known as the gait-keeper, governs whether a horse can hold an even four-beat amble. A 2022 study of Puerto Rican horses found it at 87.4 percent in the island's ordinary Criollo horses, and fixed at 100 percent in the Paso Fino. The Criollo population still carries a visible signature of selection around that spot on the chromosome.
That is what centuries of quietly choosing the comfortable horse looks like when you read it back off the DNA. The breed came after the gait, not before it.
A country race, 17 July 1797
1797 · Written down
On 17 July 1797 the French naturalist André Pierre Ledru watched horses race on the island and wrote down what he could not make sense of. It is the earliest written description of the gait we have.
“They have no trot or gallop, but a type of pace. A gait so precipitated that the eye can't follow the movement of the legs.”
André Pierre Ledru, 17 July 1797Three hundred years after the landing, the thing the island had bred was strange enough that a trained naturalist reached for a word and did not find one. He called it andadura, which is what Puerto Ricans called it too.
Prizes, and a reason to breed for it
1849 to 1882 · It becomes a sport
By 1849 there were competitions with prizes, held specifically to improve the local horses. In 1882 the island got its first racetrack, and every meeting ran Paso Fino and Andadura categories alongside the flat racing. By around 1860 the horse was distinct enough to be identified as a breed in its own right.
That is also when the three speeds got their names. Before the competitions there was one gait and people rode it at whatever pace the ground allowed. Judging it required a vocabulary.
Speed 1 of 3
Full collection, almost no ground covered
The horse is fully collected and its forward speed is extremely slow, while the footfall is exceedingly rapid. The steps are exceedingly short. It is the show gait, and it is the hardest thing the breed does. A horse cannot be held into it: any sign that it is being excessively restrained is penalized, as is a horse that fights the bit, flattens its ears or swishes its tail.
Speed 2 of 3
Moderate speed, the one you ride all day
Forward speed is moderate, with full to moderate collection. The steps cover ground but are unhurried, at medium extension and stride. This is the trail gait, roughly as quick as a trot and nothing like as rough, and it is the gait most Paso Finos spend most of their lives in.
Speed 3 of 3
Fastest, and still no bounce
The fastest speed of the gait, with a longer extension and stride and moderate to minimal collection. It is not simply the corto gone quicker: the stride itself opens up. Top speed varies horse to horse, because each one should reach its own limit in harmony with its own natural stride and cadence. A good one covers ground at canter speed with the rider still sitting still.
What they were judging
Each hoof hits the ground on its own. Four separate beats. That is why you barely move in the saddle. Three speeds, and the horse is born with all of them.
Watch the feet
Both horses below are moving at the same speed on the same clock. The Paso Fino puts one foot down at a time. The trotting horse throws two down together, twice, and every one of those landings goes straight up through the saddle.
The everyday gait. Ground-covering but unhurried, and the one a Paso Fino spends its life in.
A diagram of the rhythm, not a gait analysis. The order the feet land in is real. The tempos are set so the three speeds read apart on screen.
Real footage, not ours
Everything else moving on this page was generated, which is honest enough for a beach in 1493. The gait is the one thing that cannot be faked, because it is the one thing anyone who knows these horses reads instantly. So here it is on film, from the people who film it. The first one is Puerto Rican, which is the point.
1890s · The board
A wooden sounding board set into the floor of the ring turns the gait into something you can hear. Four hooves landing separately and evenly make a sound with no gaps in it and no doubles. A horse whose timing is off gives itself away instantly, and everybody in the building knows before the judge writes anything down.
It is not atmosphere. It is on the scorecard, and it still is.
How a classic fino class is scored
The sounding board line reads “when available”, because not every ring has one. Where there is one, the sound of the footfall is worth as much of the score as the horse's manners. Classic fino is also the one class most of the breed cannot enter. Most Paso Finos gait beautifully at corto and largo their whole lives and never have the collection for a fino class, and that is not a fault. It is the difference between a very good horse and a rare one.
Guayama, the year he was foaled
1898 to 1927 · Dulce Sueño
By the time the United States invaded in 1898 the Paso Fino was doing the island's transport and a good deal of its agricultural work, and the horses of that period were famous by name. Manchado, owned by Don Nicolás Quiñones Cabezudo of Caguas, was written up as being so fine that he would gait at liberty, with no rider on him, in the town square, when asked.
Then in 1927 a colt was foaled in the potrero of Don Genaro Cautino at Guayama, on the south coast, and reorganized the whole breed behind him. By 1947 an agricultural almanac recorded that the descendants of Dulce Sueño were the horses taking most of the titles and trophies. Guayama has held the Feria Dulce Sueño every March since 1979, named for a horse born there fifty two years earlier.
Two traditions, worked side by side
1943 to 1972 · The registry, and the split
In 1943 the Federación del Deporte de Caballos de Paso Fino de Puerto Rico was founded and a breed registry was established with it, regulated by the Puerto Rico Department of Agriculture. Copita Don Q, a grandson of Dulce Sueño, won the first annual Federation contest that same year.
Then it traveled. The first Paso Finos on the US mainland were bought by American servicemen stationed in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 1960s and shipped home. Colombian horses arrived separately, through a rancher who went down and bought a number of them to work cattle. Spanish landowners had bred the same Iberian stock on the Colombian mainland for the same reasons, and the two populations had developed independently and never mixed.
The Paso Fino Horse Association, founded in 1972, registers both groups, and under it the two have been crossbred freely ever since. Colombian bloodlines now considerably outnumber Puerto Rican ones in the United States, which is the reason preservation breeding of each line separately became something people organize around.
Puerto Rico
Prized for the fine or delicate step. The refinement is the point, and the classic fino is the peak of it.
Colombia
Tends toward a more rapid, piston-like action. Alongside it sits the trocha, a diagonal four-beat gait considered a fault in a purebred Paso Fino, which has become its own line in Colombia.
A paddock built for thirty
Now · What is left
The Livestock Conservancy lists the Puerto Rican Paso Fino as Threatened. Fewer than 500 are registered in the United States and fewer than 2,500 worldwide. For an animal that has been declared part of a nation's heritage, those are very small numbers.
There is one thing that belongs to this breed and nothing else. Tiger eye is a recessive trait that lightens the iris to amber, yellow or bright orange. It has been identified in the Puerto Rican Paso Fino and in no other horse breed on earth.
The protection is real and recent. In 1987 the Pure Puerto Rican Paso Fino Federation of America was incorporated on the mainland to keep the pure line traceable. On 3 February 2023 the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico declared the purebred Puerto Rican Paso Fino part of the island's national and cultural heritage.
Five hundred and thirty years later
The ground goes past. The horse's feet are working hard underneath you, four separate beats, faster than you can count them. And your head does not move. People who have ridden their entire lives get on one for the first time and laugh, because it feels like the horse is cheating.
Five centuries of an island choosing the comfortable one, and that is what it bought.
Questions
Each hoof hits the ground on its own. Four beats, one foot at a time, so you barely bounce. There are three speeds. Classic fino is tiny and fast, for the show ring. Paso corto is the everyday trail speed. Paso largo covers ground as fast as a canter and you still stay sitting.
Two Puerto Rican Paso Finos here are for sale: Cha Cha, an eight year old chestnut gelding at $1,500, and Paco, a chestnut Paso Fino colt foaled in August 2025 at $7,000, not started under saddle yet. Both are on the horses page, and either can be delivered anywhere on the island. If the horse you are buying needs starting or restarting, the training program takes any breed, and the rodeo photographs show what island horses do at speed.
Want to meet a Paso Fino in person? Come to Isabela.
Hacienda Los Ponce, Isabela, Puerto Rico. Email barefootridingpr@gmail.com or call and WhatsApp 904.705.2294. I answer within 24 hours.
Sources
Breed history collects a lot of repeated guesses. Everything above is traceable to one of these, and anything we could not source is not on the page.
