Horse Illustrated Magazine

A few years ago, I was window shopping online for a new horse. I wasn’t in the market, but who doesn’t like to look and see what’s out there? While scrolling through the breed menu to select “Morgan,” I noticed a breed I’d never heard of: Mangalarga Marchador.

“What the heck is this?” I wondered. Clicking on the search option brought up zero results, so I was left wondering. Other than a short breed profile we ran in Horse Illustrated a few years ago, I hadn’t heard anything about the breed or even seen it mentioned since.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, and you’d find me boarding a plane to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, home of the Associação Brasileira dos Criadores do Cavalo Mangalarga Marchador, or ABCCMM. If your Portuguese is a little rusty, that’s the Brazilian Association of Mangalarga Marchador Horse Breeders. As Brazil prepares to host the FIFA World Cup next year and South America’s first-ever Olympics in 2016, the country is working to promote its products to the rest of the world. One of those products is the Mangalarga Marchador, and that’s how this humble equine journalist got an invitation to visit.

After a less-than-enjoyable journey through air-travel land, which included an unexpected eight-hour layover in Charlotte and the fun challenge of overcoming a language barrier to rebook a missed flight in São Paulo, I arrived in Belo Horizonte. Fortunately, getting there was the low point of the trip, and it got much better from there. I met up with Ricardo Xavier and Fabio Valela from the ABCCMM who introduced me to their beloved breed and some of the people who are committed to promoting it.
Here are some of the photos from my adventure.

One evening, after returning to my hotel room, I turned on the TV and flipped through the channels to see if there was anything in English. I found something better:

Yes, this is like QVC for horse shoppers. It was in Portuguese, of course, but from what I could tell it was a call-in auction program where viewers bid on horses being shown on screen. Do we have anything like this in the U.S.? It was new to me. I’m kind of glad I don’t have something like this. I might get myself in trouble with insomnia-induced late-night impulse buys.

In my next post, I’ll tell you more about what it was like to test ride some of the Mangalarga Marchadores.

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