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ARCHIVED - The end of horse-drawn tourist carriages in Spain?
A pilot project in Spain aims to replace equines with electric vehicles
Horse-drawn carriages, popular with tourists all across Spain as a leisurely option for seeing the sights, could be removed from the streets as early as the first quarter of 2023 and replaced with more humane buggies. Draft legislation has already been approved but the different departments still have several hoops to jump through to make this a reality.
Palma de Mallorca made waves last August when it unceremoniously announced it would ban all horse-drawn carriages by 2024 but Barcelona implemented the rule way back in 2015 after an animal died in the street.
Andalucia currently has one of the highest number of these tourist coaches, and they’re particularly popular in the summer in cities like Seville, Jerez and Cordoba while in Malaga, horses have been swapped for the iconic Mijas taxi donkeys.
The Seville council and the coachmen themselves are vehemently against trading their horses for electric buggies, insisting that animal welfare measures are already in place, such as ensuring that the carriages never carry more than 80 kilos, that horses have breaks during the hottest part of the day and drivers adhere to restricted working hours.
Despite these protestations, several horses drop dead of exhaustion and dehydration on the country’s streets every summer and a technical report by one animal rights group found that "the permanence of these animals for long periods of time standing when they are not circulating, is the cause of injuries to tendons, muscles and bones”. The horses are also continuously exposed to loud noises and other stress situations, they added.
To push ahead with the proposal, once the Ministry of Industry has approved the use of electric carriages, a pilot project in Palma will replace horses with electric buggies this spring. It’s hoped that formal regulations will be approved across all of Spain in the near future but in the meantime, the department will support and advise other municipalities who wish to make the transition away from equines.
This coming August, Italy will convert all horse-drawn carriage licences to ones for electric vehicles or taxis and in New York, the famous Central Park horses will be phased out from 2024. Prague has banned equine carriages since the start of the year and Paris, London, Montreal, New Delhi, Tel Aviv and Las Vegas have all come out in favour of making the switch to electric.
Image: Archive
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