Eight years ago, we bought four horses to keep at our family finca, Los Islotes.
Our kids have been enthusiastic riders since Ireland.
On my desk is a photo of Kaitlin with her arms around 2-year-old Jackson on Kaitlin’s pony Chesapeake in the forever muddy back garden of our home in Waterford.
Kaitlin and Jackson belonged to riding clubs in Ireland and in France and Panama City, too. An equestrian center has always been part of the Los Islotes plan.
Plus, this is horse country. Kids learn to ride as they learn to walk and to rope just a few years later. The annual rodeos are a big deal. Los Islotes is a proud sponsor of the local junior team…
So, years ago, when we were getting started out here and heard that a local rancher had some horses he wanted to sell, we got in touch.
Los Islotes is in Quebro. The rancher was in Cocoa, a pueblo just south of us known for its fine horse stock. We made a day trip of visiting with the hospitable rancher in his home and, after some back and forth, we settled on four mares.
Just a few days after we’d brought her to Los Islotes, one of our new horses broke the fence. In the dead of night through jungle and across rivers, she made her way back to Cocoa. We figured that if she wanted to go home that badly, we should let her.
That left us with three horses.
Turned out, all three were pregnant, though no one realized. They gave birth the next year…
And all three foaled again a year-and-a-half after that. Guadalupe gave birth a third time 18 months later…
We’d found us the most fertile horses in all Veraguas.
Now they needed a place to live.
We set about building our stables…
Today, the stables are a focal point on the property… a comfortable gathering place not only for our horses…
But for us, too. This summer we used the space as the base for our First Annual Los Islotes Summer Camp For Extraordinary Young Women…
To regroup… we bought four horses…
One ran away.
We’ve sold four.
And today we have eight…
In all, we’ve had nine foals come into the world on our property.
We have trouble keeping them all straight. Who belongs to who… we’re constantly asking each other.
Our first construction project at Los Islotes, other than our home, was our beach bar, Panama Jack’s…
I had the idea at the time to paint a mural around the bar.
“We could tell the story of our coast,” I suggested to our righthand woman out here, Dalys. “Of the Spanish landing on these shores… and of Urraca fighting them off.”
Dalys was the one who’d told me the story of Urraca. He’s a national hero, a brave indigenous warrior who managed to unite the nine warring tribes on the Veraguas coast into an army that was able to fight off the Spanish invaders for nine years.
“Would you know someone who could paint something like that for us?” I asked Dalys.
“Yes, there is a man,” Dalys told me. “He is like a genius. He can paint anything. When he’s not drunk.”
“Ah,” I replied. “Is he often drunk?”
“Yes, you could say that,” Dalys admitted. “He likes his seco.”
Dalys made three trips to his house before catching El Tigre, as he’s known, in a condition capable of holding a paintbrush.
She brought him to Los Islotes, where we put him up for five nights. Each morning he’d sit on the concrete floor of Panama Jack’s and set to painting. He didn’t work from a drawing. He didn’t sketch anything on the wall before him. He simply started painting.
El Tigre is not only often drunk. He’s also half-blind. But we watched as, over five days, he painted the four sides of our bar to show the great masted ships of the Spanish arriving on our coast and the battles that ensued as those who already called this coast home fought to keep the conquistadores at bay.
In the years since, we’ve brought El Tigre back to Los Islotes several times to paint more murals… including of the Panama Canal…
And one of our two granddaughters in the garden…
“Let’s see if we can get El Tigre’s attention for another project,” I suggested to Dalys earlier this year.
“I’d like to memorialize the history of our horses.”
“Great idea, Senora Kathleen,” Dalys said. “We could paint something on the far side of the stables.”
El Tigre has just finished his work. Here’s our Los Islotes horse family tree, with Santiago and Apolonia at the head…
Until next time,
