Equus Asinus

It is exactly fifteen years now, from 2010 when I returned to Spain after so many years away, with a teaching contract in Costa Blanca, and I first looked to buy a donkey to walk with, and a companion donkey because they are sociable animals and should not live alone. I found the companion donkey first! Rubí was a two-year old mixed breed standard brown donkey with a white nose, and I just liked her personality and curiosity which were immediately attractive. So I bought her and carried on looking for my ‘walking donkey’.

I was very clear that my walking donkey should be an andaluz. Andalusian donkeys are one of the main Spanish breeds and were – back in 2010 – an endangered breed. They are still regarded as such today, although a huge effort has been made by breeders in Andalucia to preserve the breed. As far as I know there are about 800 pure bred Andalusians in Spain in 2025. This figure may be modified as I continue the work of these next few posts, because I am soon travelling by train across the country to spend some time talking with one of the best known donkey breeders in Spain, Pepe Selfa. It is the culmination of fifteen years of curiosity about Matilde – my andaluza – and her origins. For shortly after buying Rubí my friend Barbara Reed came here from France and helped me choose a walking donkey, based on her long experience of walking the Compostela routes with her donkey Dalie, who I had been fortunate to walk with in France in her dotage.

So, in these photos from December 2010, we see Matilde being evaluated by Barbara in Parcent stables (Marina Alta, Valencia), and with Rubí and me after I had bought her. We then put them together to bond as friends in the stables before moving them down to the place I was preparing for them in Finestrat. Note the colouring of Matilde, which is typical of the young donkeys of the Andalusian breed: she still has a brownish-grey coat and will later lighten and develop the classic grey dappled coat of the breed. (Sancho Panza’s donkey in the 17th century literary classic Don Quixote was called “Dapple” and many donkeys of this breed are given the name “Platero” – or silver – which gave rise to another literary classic, Platero y Yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez which earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature 1956.)

17-year old Matilde in her dappled early winter coat. A pure burra andaluza with the classic fine facial features of this breed which were passed on to her foal Aitana, now a 14-year-old mixed breed who has different colouring but keeps her mother’s fine line of nose and jaw. (Photographed today while writing this blog post.) Those two original donkeys I bought in 2010 were both already pregnant, so don’t blame me for mixing breeds(!) but I became more and more interested in the history of the Andalusian donkey and the saving of the endangered breed.

Now in November 2025 the moment has come for me to connect with Andalucia. I have followed Pepe Selfa on Facebook for several years and enjoyed his posts of the latest foals he has bred. Pepe is one of the best known donkey breeders in Spain and – we might say – an institution in the traditional country life around Cordoba. His prize-winning pure bred Andalusians all take his family name, so for example the gorgeous foal that has just been weaned from his mother and put out to pasture is called Colón D’selfa

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Baptising foal in Palma del Rio

In one week from now I shall finally be travelling from Alicante – in a train across La Mancha – to towards Cordoba and Palma del Rio, to spend some time discovering how Pepe Selfa and other breeders saved the Andalusian breed. I shall write about that experience here on the blog next week, live from the experience of being with Pepe and his herd in Andalucia. Between now and then, I shall post a little more background and research, starting with this YouTube video about the recuperation of the breed in which Pepe Selfa features: