The Spanish Riding School

One of the secrets of the Lipizzaners' excellence is adherence to a rigid set of breeding principles, the chief of which is selection based on performance: only the best are allowed to continue the line. So it happens that one still sees today in the baroque showplace of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna the descendants of the best horses who lived at the Lipizza stud in the eighteenth century, such as Pluto and Conversano. The bloodlines of the stallions and mares at the federal stud at Fiber and in the Stallburg in Vienna are more direct than the family trees of many a noble family jealous of its prestige. "Noble horses" is a phrase rightly applied to Lippizzaners. "It is not their calculable value which determines their quality," writes Otmar Schmehlik, "but the beauty of their whole appearance, their charm, and the harmony of their movements."


from Hans Handler's book: For almost 350 years the famous Spanish horses were bred in the tiny hamlet in the Karst from which they derive their name: Lipizzaners from Lipizza. The stud and the place were inseparable. Through times of peace and war, of natural catastrophe and pestilence, nothing could shake this enduring tie. Even when the Istrian Peninsula became a battlefront of the First World War and the horses were "temporarily" transferred to Laxenburg near Vienna and to Kladrub in Bohemia, people still assumed that when peace came everything would be as it had been before.But it was not to be. In 1918 the Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell, and its fall seemed to spell the end for Europe's oldest breed of school horses. Negotiations between Italy and Austria dragged on for two more years, with both countries laying claim to the stud. At last the Lipizzaners were divided between them, and the Austrian share was moved to a new home at Piber in Styria.