Rapa das Bestas: Spain’s Insane Horse Wrestling Festival
The sound of neighs and whinnies fills the jam-packed corral, a
centuries-old stone amphitheater. Dust flies through the air as men
grapple to keep control of what seems like a sea of horses – a seething
mass of animals numbering in their hundreds. There are not many activities that pit man against beast in such
visceral fashion, but Rapa das Bestas (meaning "cropping the beasts") is
certainly one of them. In this 400-year-old Spanish tradition, men
wrestle horses to the ground with nothing more than their bare hands in
many cases. First, however, they must catch the animals. Wild horses roam the mountains of Galicia, the northwestern region of
Spain, but each year local villagers and visitors fetch them down from
the higher ground, rounding them up so that the locals can clip their
manes and tails and brand the foals.
The most famous event is the three-day festival held in the village of
San Lorenzo de Sabucedo, where the use of nothing but hands – no tools
or ropes – is permitted. Muscles bulge as men (and some women) grapple
with the untamed horses so as to subdue them, often barely hanging on
with their fingers.
There are plenty of people who consider Rapa das Bestas cruel and
condemn the festival, but others point out that it offers the
opportunity to see to the needs of animals that are ill or infected by
parasites.
It takes three men (known as "aloitadores") to manage each horse: one
who gets on the horse's back, another who takes hold of the neck, and a
third to take the tail. They then wrestle the horse to the floor in
order to shear its hair – apparently to stop it from overheating during
the hotter months – or brand it if it is a younger horse that has not
previously been tagged.
The origins of this horse wrestling festival are the stuff of legend. In
the mid-16th century, a plague hit Sabucedo, and two sisters prayed to
San Lorenzo, the patron saint of the village, for deliverance. When the
village was saved, the sisters gave two horses as an offering, setting
them free in the hills above the town. Supposedly, the horses are the
ancestors of the hundreds that live wild in the various herds today.
Myth notwithstanding, the Sabucedo Rapa festival was first documented at
the start of the 18th century when it was held with two purposes in
mind: the first, simply the hygiene of the horses; the second, to keep
tabs on the herds. Once the wrestlers had pitted their strength against
the horses, they were treated to wine and food. And just as the reasons
behind the event stand to this day, so too do the festivities, which
take place each night.
Nowadays, the festival
begins on the first Saturday in July – starting with an early morning
mass prior to the herders heading off at 7am – and goes on into the
Monday. Both locals and tourists are permitted to go in search of the
horses and bring them down to the village.
Although outsiders are welcome participants in the festival's early
stages, only locals are allowed to be aloitadores. Such is the
difficulty of their task that it was used as an example of courage by
Spain’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Camilo José Cela, who wrote of
"bravery which was only comparable to that of the aloitadores of
Sabucedo."
On the final day of Rapa das Bestas, when the work and partying is over,
the horses are herded back into the mountains, where they are allowed
to roam free for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, the village cleans up
from the festival and goes back to its quiet daily routine
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