Klarina and Cuatro-Por-Cuatro cool off (Photo: Nicolás Haro)
We founded Riding Andalusia in 2018, and were quickly recommended in the best selling British newspaper, the Daily Mail, in October that year:
Riding Andalusia, based five minutes from Seville airport, offers everything equestrian, from horseback day trips in Seville’s countryside, to scheduled or custom-tailored week-long treks across Andalusia’s most beautiful landscapes, including polo. They cater to riders of all abilities, including learners. (Online here)
Below is a little about our founder, the horsewoman Klarina Pichler, as reported to the Spanish national newspaper ABC in November 2018.
Klarina Pichler arrived in Seville, Andalusia, from her own polo club in Austria in 2013. Klarina is a player of whom it was said she was in the top five women in the world, reaching a +4 goal handicap…Growing up with horses in her native Salzburg, she was a champion at dressage, show-jumping and by the age of twenty-five had moved on to jockeying racehorses in Munich in Germany.
In Zurich, she found a English thoroughbred male foal, El Star, to begin a breeding herd. He had originally been purchased sight unseen for €100,000, so good was his lineage: his grandfather was Northern Dancer, the 20th century’s “sire of sires” (his never-beaten cousin Frankel, was rated by the World Thoroughbred Racehorse Rankings Committee as the best racehorse in their history.)
Klarina on El Star (Photo: Nicolás Haro)
“I wanted the very best and wanted to start small, because I wanted to make them one by one myself, to train them myself, in my own way.”
Inspired by the “natural horsemanship” techniques of Monty Roberts – the source for the novel and film ‘The Horse Whisperer’ – Klarina disliked others methods of making a horse rideable.
“They break its spirit through fear. I come from the idea of inspiring confidence, making the horse confident about being ridden.”
She founded the Alpe Carinthia Polo Club in 2008 and there hosted 120 horses along with her own herd of 40…. However, the offer of managing a polo club in Seville was too much to refuse. “Seville is not only historically beautiful and beautifully historic, it also seemed to have an untapped potential with its indigenous horse culture.”
Klarina is currently a resident polo professional where her horses are housed at Iridike Polo Club next to Sotogrande.
Riding Andalusia 