'La Saca': How Spain captures its wild horses of the marshlands

Every year, Andalusia's yegüerizos corral a rare breed of horses in a sacred event that blends centuries-old tradition with modern conservation.

Herds of Marismeña mares and foals break into a gallop as they leave their enclosure. They are beginning the route out of southern Spain's Doñana National Park toward El Rocío, crossing the frame in a rush of bodies, tails, dust, and light.
Photographs byManuel Naranjo Martell
Text byCarol Huang
Published June 5, 2026

Every year on June 26, as many as 1,000 Marismeño horses leave a UNESCO World Heritage Site where they live and enter the Andalusian town of Almonte. They come in on a thunder of hoofbeats, stirring up clouds of dust that rise to Almonte’s tiled roofs, and fill the air with the scent of their sweat and the smell of the marshlands.

The event has been happening for more than 500 years. Called La Saca de las Yeguas, the Roundup of the Mares, it takes place at the start of the dry season when mounted herdsmen known as yegüerizos (yeh-geh-REE-zohs) drive the horses out of the wilderness to Almonte’s livestock market. Horses that aren’t sold are returned to Doñana National Park, where the Guadalquivir River pours into the Atlantic Ocean, creating a labyrinth of wetlands that include lagoons, ponds and seasonal marshes called marismas that give the horses their name.

Public access into the park is controlled, but a decade ago, photographer Manuel Naranjo Martell began researching La Saca and eventually wrangled permission to join the yegüerizos in the Park. Martell’s new book of photos, Saca 1504, celebrates a breed whose direct ancestors may have been among the first horses brought to the Americas, and it honors the yegüerizos whose deft horsemanship preceded South America’s gauchos and the vaqueros and cowboys of North America.

The book captures what tourists to La Saca don’t usually see: the horses in their natural habitat galloping across coastal marshlands, the silhouettes of men on horseback in woodlands dappled with sunlight. The photos also showcase the land—one of dust and burning sun, ocean mists and sandy beaches covered by hoof prints that vanish with the tides.

Two people look at horses with a starry night sky behind them.
Under a sky filled with stars, Lucas Domínguez and José María Padilla, two yegüerizos, stand among Marismeña mares and foals at Rocina Sur. La Saca (the round-up) is held together by these elements: the night sky, the mares, and the yegüerizos who watch over them.
Mares stand packed together in the dust of the corrals at Almonte's Recinto Ganadero. Their heads and backs emerge like a wave as yegüerizos separate them one by one to trim their manes, a practice known locally as tuzar.
Pedro Vega, left, Alfonso Ramírez, center, and the late Mario, far right—yegüerizos from the reuniones, or groups, of José “El Fontanero” and Francisco Paula—stand beside the carriola (the covered wagon or trailer) at the end of the day. After hours of work, a cold Cruzcampo beer becomes part of the rhythm of rest, heat, and brotherhood.

Inside Spain’s largest wetland

The Guadalquivir River begins above 4,400 feet in the Sierra de Cazorla mountains and descends to the ocean, creating the largest estuary in the Gulf of Cadiz. Castilian nobles in the late Middle Ages favored the area as hunting grounds because of its abundance of wild boars.

Conservation efforts began in 1950, when biologist José Antonio Valverde and the 5th Marquis of Bonanza, Mauricio González Gordon, helped persuade the government of dictator Francisco Franco to abandon plans that would have drained the marshlands for farming. With assistance from the World Wildlife Fund, the park was established in 1969, and in 1994 it became a UNESCO World Heritage site, with over 130,000 acres.

The park hosts over 300 species of birds and is a critical flyway for those migrating between Africa and the European continent. It is also known for its population of Iberian Lynx, one of the world’s most endangered cats. The landscape is a collage of wetlands, woodlands, shifting dunes and fossilized sand cliffs. The climate swings from soaking winter floods to parched summers. It is a harsh environment in which Marismeños evolved into a hardy and resilient breed.

A Marismeña mare and her foal run across dry ground near La Rocina, raising dust as the scattered animals are gathered. During La Saca, the horses move between instinct, territory, and the guidance of the yegüerizos.
Yegüerizos ride across open ground at Rocina Sur, their chivatas cutting the sky as dust rises behind the horses. The day’s work has just ended: the last herds of mares have been brought into the enclosure by the reuniones of José “El Fontanero” and Francisco Paula.
Yegüerizos handle a foal in the dust of the enclosure at the Recinto Ganadero in Almonte. Once the herds reach town, the open movement of La Saca gives way to close, physical work, carried out on foot among mares, foals, fences, and dust.
A yegüerizo wrangles a foal at Recinto Ganadero as mares move around him. Inside the corrals, the work becomes intense as each animal is separated and handled.
Prints are seen in the dunes
Footprints cross the dunes of the beach in Doñana National Park, cutting through wind-shaped sand and low vegetation. In Martell's book Saca 1504, these traces evoke an older Atlantic departure: the movement from these Andalusian landscapes toward the equestrian cultures that would later take root across the Americas.

A horse of the marshes

Some believe Marismeños were among the horses that survived Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the Americas and that Hernan Cortés brought to the New World in the early 1500s.

In 2008, Spanish officials recognized Marismeño horses as an endangered indigenous breed—according to Equestrian magazine, “the Marismeño exhibits similarities to other closely related Iberian breeds, including the more famous Andalusian and Lusitano, and the lesser known Retuerta and Sorraia”—and in 2012 began a stud book with fewer than 1,000 mares and 20 stallions. The Marismeño horses are shorter than other breeds, with wide hooves adapted for the marismas. They have lived in the marshes for centuries, surviving without human intervention, except when locals needed them for farming and rounded them up—a practice formalized in 1504 by the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

As farming methods changed, the horses were no longer needed and became largely feral. Today, the free-grazing horses serve a different purpose. They keep vegetation inside the park in check and help reduce the risk of wildfires that are an increasing threat.

With their annual round-up, the yegüerizos are critical to the local government’s efforts to maintain a balanced population of roughly 1,500 horses in the park. They enter Doñana a night or two before they muster the horses. At dawn they wake from wherever they have slept—in a tent or under a tree with their saddle as a pillow. They put on flat-brimmed hats and tie kerchiefs around their necks that they pull over their noses when the horses kick up too much dust. Their only tool is a slender stick called a “chivata.”

Saddles, stirrups, blankets, and hats rest on a fence at the camp in Rocina Sur, while horses stand in the background. After a long day of livestock work, rest belongs to both the yegüerizos and their horses.
A mounted yegüerizo moves alongside Marismeña mares as they enter El Rocío through Boca del Lobo, onto Calle Sanlúcar. The frame breaks into dust, legs, reins, and motion, revealing the physical negotiation between yegüerizo and herd.
A horse stands in a field
The horse of Juan José “El Cuartito” rests at dusk after the long journey from Almonte into Doñana. Sweat and saddle marks remain visible on its coat after a day of heat, dust, and travel.
Yegüerizos ride through dust and pine shadows near La Rocina. The group is moving from Almonte toward the area where the Reunión de José “El Fontanero” will settle for several days during La Saca de las Yeguas. A reunión is a traditional group of yegüerizos—often made up of family members, close companions, and horsemen linked to one another—who travel, camp, and work to move the mares.
Mares and foals pass before the sanctuary of the Virgen del Rocío on their return to the marsh. Unlike the public arrival days earlier, the way back is intimate and silent: a solemn passage between the yegüerizos and the animals returning to their fincas in the Coto until the following year.

For the next 12 to 16 hours, they ride through woods and over scrubland, mud flats and marshes to gather horses. Fathers, sons and grandfathers work alongside each other. They need stamina to pursue the horses, and experience, skill and patience to keep hundreds of them together and calm.

“They [the horses] can be incredibly fast and really nervous,” Martell says. “The younger yegüerizos want to run with the mares and go fast… But the older ones, they will go around the horses, not running, because if you start running, the mares will be much faster. So they have to do it slowly, little by little.” Their day ends at 9 or 10 pm after the last horses are corralled. The next morning the yegüerizos herd the horses to El Rocio, a 13th-century town on the edge of the park where a priest blesses the horses before they continue another 10 miles to reach Almonte.

(The wild west lives on in southern Spain)

Before entering Almonte, the yegüerizos make a final stop with the horses under the shade of pine trees, where their families meet them with lunch—cold salads with tuna, potatoes cooked with squid and watermelon.

After lunch, the yegüerizos herd the horses in groups toward the pens of the livestock market as bystanders crowd the streets to watch. Over the coming days, the yegüerizos rid the horses of parasites by trimming their manes and tails in a process known as la tusa. To control the horses’ impact on the Doñana ecosystem, some of the animals will be sold, including older horses and foals to be used for meat. The rest are freed back into the mists and watery wilderness of Doñana.

People on horses ride toward a church
Yegüerizos ride through dust toward the sanctuary of the Virgen del Rocío, their chivatas raised against the light. As mares, foals, horses, and yegüerizos pass before the Virgin to receive her blessing, the route becomes a procession of work, faith, and inherited ceremony.
Francisco “Pelito,” one of the elder figures of the Reunión de José “El Fontanero,” rests during a midday pause. In the heat of La Saca, shade, food, conversation, and silence are as much a part of the tradition as the movement of horses.
Mares and foals move through dust as yegüerizos separate the youngest animals from the herd. Newborn foals considered too young to endure the following day’s journey to Almonte remain in Doñana with their mothers.

A photographer’s personal journey

Martell’s grandfather was born in Cañales, 40 miles from Almonte, but Martell did not know about La Saca until 2016, when someone suggested he see the event while he was finishing a book on bullfighters, Tarde de toros.

Martell went to La Saca, but he became consumed with a personal project, 2016, a book honoring his grandfather, who died that year after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When Martell was finally able to join the yegüerizos inside the park a few years later, he was overwhelmed with emotion.

“When I got to Doñana, I was in a way having a contact with all the stories that my grandfather told me,” he says. “I started watching these elderly men working, horse-riding with their grandsons, fathers taking their sons there. It was a way look into my past and to my roots, to my father, to my grandfather.”

(Spain's lesser-known UNESCO World Heritage sites)

A close up of a horses mane
The mane and coat of a Marismeña mare fill the frame at Rocina Sur in the evening. The animal is already inside the enclosure where the herds of mares, horses, and foals gathered from the Coto are brought together before La Saca.
A medal of the Virgen del Rocío hangs over Francisco Paula’s shirt in El Rocío. In La Saca de las Yeguas, devotion to the Virgin is not separate from the work; it is carried on the body, beside rope, horse, and sweat.
Chemari, a young yegüerizo from the Reunión de José “El Fontanero,” faces the camera from behind his horse’s ears at Rocina Sur. Mounted and ready, he prepares for the central day of La Saca de las Yeguas, a tradition whose formal record stretches back to the early sixteenth century.

Now, Saca 1504 pays homage to the yegüerizos, the Marismeños and the land that shaped them. It reflects the evolution of the region from royal hunting grounds into a sanctuary for wildlife and the evolution of a semi-feral farm animal into a partner in conservation grazing. The stars are the yegüerizos, who support efforts to protect the land for future generations by plying centuries-old skills.

Martell began his work on Saca 1504 as his grandfather’s life ended, but he wanted the book to end with beginnings. One of his last photos shows a yegüerizo holding Martell’s new baby daughter.

There are also photos of horses’ hoof prints beside the ocean and images of a document created in the 1500s called Lienzo de Tlaxcala. It pictures Hernan Cortés astride a horse as he meets with the Tlaxcalans, who will help him to overthrow the Aztecs. Hoof prints cover their path.

“It’s probably one of the first representations of the horses [in America,]” Martell says. “Ending my work this way was recreating that trip the horses and this tradition of horse riding across the Atlantic. It went abroad, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, towards America. …My mother is from the States, so I wanted to have that crossing. A personal crossing, but also realizing that horses come from here, from Spain, and the tradition comes from here, from Spain.”

Horses run amongst trees with sunlight filtering through
Mares and foals move through the pine forest of El Pastorcito during el sesteo. At midday, in the harshest heat, animals and yegüerizos pause before the afternoon route to Almonte, while families gather around food, shade, and celebration.
Manuel Naranjo Martell (b. 1988, Seville) is a Spanish–American photographer whose work explores ritual, landscape, and cultural memory. Manuel is currently publishing his book SACA 1504, focusing on the ancestral horse culture of Doñana, Spain and its transatlantic legacy.
Carol Huang is a former Reuters journalist covering Wall Street and the airline industry. Besides National Geographic, she has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, The American Scholar, Glamour, Maxim, Institutional Investor and other media. Her work has won awards for investigative reporting, feature writing and been included in the Best American writing series.