Juan Pons--HISTORY OF THE CLUB ESCOLA MENORQUINA--Fulfilling a vision and dream

Above in Juan Pons in 1958 To know the history of the Club Escola Menorquina, we must travel back to 1940, when JOAN PONS MARTÍ (president and founder of the Club Escola Menorquina) was born on a Minorcan farm. The inevitable contact with the horses used to work the land made him discover what would be his great affection in life: horses. The fact that he lived and worked in the Minorcan countryside until thirty-seven years of age suggests a permanent contact between Joan Pons Martí and horses. For all Minorcan country dwellers (who were the majority of the population at the time), working the land required animals, since there was no sort of technical innovation in the agricultural field (motor-powered machinery did not arrive until the 1960s).
In 1959 Joan Pons Martí began to take part in Minorca's festivals.

Traditionally, horses were led out at the festivals with minimal preparation, since their main task was to work the land. There were even cases of youngsters asking a farm for a horse and then leading it out without even giving the animal any kind of trial, since the horse had worked in the fields until the day of the festival. This led to the behaviour of some animals being virtually wild.

On Minorca, there was the idea that if the horses bucked, they could not be properly broken-in nor completely subjected to the rider's wishes because, by its nature, the horse bucks for reasons of self-defence. Despite this, some riders preferred that the horse bucked since then it would be more reliable when it came to working. Seeing horses with a high school discipline, he began to apply airs of this high level to Minorcan horses, even when they had already been broken-in according to the style of the festivals. Some of these airs are the passage, the piaf, and others. Furthermore, they were able to perfect airs that had always been present in Minorca. Everyone had always made the horse gallop, but nobody ever looked to see if the horse galloped with one hoof or another, and took even less notice of how to tell the horse with which hoof to begin galloping.

Joan Pons Martí, Consuelo Marquès Melià(his wife) and a friend, Antoni Marquès Taltavull, brought together three horses disciplined in the Minorcan style with some important airs from other disciplines and began to do pieces and acts together.

The resultant carousels were shown to the public and were very well received, and consequentially people asked for them more and more whenever there was a celebration or a mass event.

As with everything at the beginning, there were people who dismissed the work of Joan Pons Martí and his friends, but these were the same people who afterwards tried to do the same with their own horses.

The Espectacle Eqüestre Realitats de Menorca began in 1987, and shows how the horses are prepared for traditional festivals, there is a carousel of Minorcan Thoroughbreds, a display of long reign work, a colt being broken in, a display of different animal-drawn carriages and wagons that used to be employed on Minorca and a carousel of Spanish horses broken in according to the Minorcan discipline.