About 45 minutes away
Horse Training in Rincón
Rincón sits at the western corner of Puerto Rico, known for its surf, its cliffs and its sunsets. Horses kept there come up to Isabela for the month.
Rincón is the surf town, on the westernmost point of the island, with cliffs, well known beaches and a lot of people passing through. Underneath the visitor traffic there are people who actually live there and keep horses there, and that is who this page is for. A horse in Rincón has the same four or five problems as a horse anywhere else, and they do not fix themselves because the view is good.
An hour and twenty from the stable
I am not based in Rincón. Barefoot Riding PR works out of Hacienda Los Ponce in Isabela, on the northwest coast, and Rincón is about a 45 minute drive from that gate. It is the furthest of the west coast towns I run regularly, and it is still well inside the 90 minutes that covers most of this corner of the island. Your horse stays at the stable for the four weeks, so that 45 minutes is a drive you make at the start, at the end, and whenever you want to come and look. Worth planning around rather than worth worrying about.
What happens in the four weeks
$500 for 16 sessions over four weeks. Stable and feed are separate. Four days a week. It starts on the ground, because most of the job is there: leading properly, giving to pressure, standing still, accepting hands and a girth without an argument. Manners, then listening, then work under saddle, in that order. Every week you get a progress video, which matters more from 45 minutes away than it does from twenty. Any breed and any background, from a four year old nobody has sat on to a horse who has been out in a field since the hurricane. Pushy on the rope, bucking, refusing the saddle, head-shy about hands, switched off the moment the rope comes away: those are the ones I see most, and they all start in the same place, which is on the ground with a person he is actually paying attention to. The training page lays out the sequence in full and says which problem starts at which step.
What the four weeks does not do is turn a horse into a finished article you never have to think about again. It gives you one that leads properly, stands to be tacked up, and listens. What you do with that afterwards is the part that keeps it.
On the ground
Shoulders and hips, off a light feel.
Both sides, over and over, until it is boring. This is what listening looks like from the outside: the ask is quiet and the horse moves the part that was asked for. It is also most of what a progress video shows, which from 45 minutes away is the difference between knowing how the month is going and hoping.
Moving the horse, and what comes after
If getting him up the coast is the sticking point, that is horse transport, quoted separately from the program, up to three horses at a time, island wide, with a price back within 24 hours. Rincón is also a photography town, and equestrian photography is $ from 250 an hour on location with the first 15 km of travel included, or from $from 150 an hour at the stable, with somebody holding the horse the whole session. The photographer is not part of that rate. If you are looking to buy rather than train, Cha Cha is a chestnut Paso Fino gelding at $1,500 and Paco is a young Paso Fino stallion at $7,000, both on the sales page.
Other towns nearby
Keeping a horse in Rincón? Tell me what he is doing.
Email barefootridingpr@gmail.com or call and WhatsApp 904.705.2294. I answer within 24 hours.
