Post
Portuguese Equestrian Society Centennial
The Portuguese Equestrian Society (Sociedade Hipica Portuguesa with the acronym SHP) has recently celebrated its 100th birthday. We hereby extend our most sincere congratulations. Come to think about it, with such a long history of horses and such a long independence, the Portuguese Equestrian Society could have been still much older.
The delicious art-deco logo gives away the timeframe of the Portuguese Equestrian Society’s foundation. A horse on its hind legs, with a heroically naked gentleman on it having a torch in his hand. All this against golden rays springing out of a background of the type of green that reminds us of noble families’ weapon shields. And we imagine that it must have started more or less that way. After all, at the start of the last century, there probably weren’t a lot of people with the financial resources to have a horse, more so, for non-labor purposes.
Today, things are a little different, and the Society, with its headquarters, its training fields and its tracks at Campo Grande since 1930, fully embraced its role as Public Utility Organization and currently offers the possibility to do Hippotherapy. As they say themselves, this therapy is for “All individuals with special needs, independently of age, as long as there are no counter-indications against equestrian sports”.
The SHP has given Portugal many medals in Olympic games and has been organizing since it came into existence, the Official International Jumping Competition (CSIO), that happens to be the world’s oldest competition to be held in the same place. The 90th edition was held, in the Campo Grande facilities. Maybe that was a good opportunity to fall in love with the world of everything horses, or it was simply an opportunity to be close to the talented people that gather in Lisbon to vie for a trophy of a sport that deserves more attention in the media.
Tags: Equitation, Horses