Where There Are Horses

"There's the caballo. Ayun!'.

Isaac squealed in his jumble of English, Spanish and Filipino languages that usually make up his sentences, to point to the horses that ventured close to the fences, along a tree-lined path that leads to the Spanish village of Guadiaro, a ten-minute drive from our house. We have just had our €2 breakfast from our favourite cafe with Isaac's grandparents and decided to show them around the community we have come to love.

The area is actually made up of connecting villages, as most of them are in Spain. We have started off in Pueblo Nuevo de Guadiaro, passing the restaurants and retail shops which caters to the affluent crowd of Sotogrande just across the road, and carried on the path that leads to the bank of the River Guadiaro. In the distance, the village of San Enrique de Guadiaro is perched up the hill.

In this part of the world, we don't need to go far to come across the famous Andalusian horses, those fabled creatures of beauty, whose dance is often described as poetry in motion. They graze on the fields visible from the motorways or trot up the hills and the beaches, to give delight to children who are occasionally treated for a ride on their back. Isaac is too young to get a ride but the horses are happy to let him stroke their beautiful coat.

This is what our weekends are like nowadays - coffee mornings followed by lazy walks. Spain, we have discovered, is so family friendly you can find free entertainment anywhere - parks in every corner, blue flag beaches, farm animals in the fields - everything that would keep a little child happily stimulated. This alone is perhaps enough to justify the decision to move here in the first place, not that we need to convince anyone!