The horse writhes and kicks, then stops struggling, while the assailants hold the animal's head.A burly veteran advances with spring-loaded scissors and hacks the mane and tail with a rasping click-clack, an operation that is speedy rather than artistic. The horsehair was once collected and sold for shaving brushes and paintbrushes, but is now thrown aside. One aloitador tosses a fistful of mane to a girl by the ringside, and she plucks and strokes her trophy for the rest of the afternoon. Thesegalego ponies, whose bloodline goes back millennia, are famed for their fleetfootedness. The Roman historian Pliny, in one of the first documents to mention this remote corner of Spain, describes the fierce nobility of these horses, and recounts the legend that the mares were inseminated by the wind.The creatures rest during the afternoon heat, manes swaying against chomping jaws as they crop the broom and heather, seeking the shade of birches and scrubby bushes.
They stroll in groups, foals close by their dams, mostly indifferent to locals and visitors who approach. Whinnying greetings echo from hill to hill, as they swish long manes and tails they are shortly to lose.Like many fiestas, the Rapa da Bestas has religious origins In 1567, Sabucedo was stricken by plague. The story goes that two elderly sisters prayed to Saint Laurence for deliverance. They were saved, and the sisters offered in gratitude two of the finest mares on the mountainside.From them descend the so-called "saint's cavalry", equine leaders that belong to the community and are marked with a cut on the ear, latterly by microchip. "It taps into our wild side, which many people are only too keen to suppress."The action starts at dawn on the first Saturday in July, when villagers head for the hills to round up horses. The operation takes all morning until the animals are driven to the outskirts of the village in a dark, noisy stampede. "And of course," he added with a cheerful swig from his beer bottle, "it's a chance for youngsters to get together for three days and nights of partying in complete freedom." He turns serious again.
Three days of fiesta and high-energy combat later, the horses are sent up the hillside again, to roam freely over their ancestral domain. Unlike many Spanish fiestas with animals, the Rapa da Bestas, which, despite its fearsome name, means only "shearing the animals", involves no cruelty, no blood and no death. "It comes from a noble tradition in which a man pits his strength against a beast without ropes or weapons, just his bare hands and his wits. It reminds us of our deepest roots," said Xose Vasquez, 40, a varnisher from nearby Estrada, who had pitched his tent among thousands of visitors in the shade of the oak forests that surround Sabucedo. You know that summer has come to Spain's north-west region of Galicia when the wild horses come down from the mountain to have their hair cut.