Nearly 9,000 animals embody centuries of adaptation to island landscapes, but every one of the archipelago’s officially recognized native breeds remains at risk
An island preserves memory in unexpected forms. It survives in stone walls crossing old pastures, in footpaths worn into the earth, in words whose meanings belong to another century, in agricultural rituals repeated long after their original necessity has disappeared. But memory also survives in bloodlines. It lives in animals shaped over generations by volcanic soil, Atlantic weather, geographic isolation and the patient labor of the people who bred, worked with and cared for them. Across the Azores, that living inheritance now has a number: 8,989 animals belonging to seven officially recognized native breeds. Yet behind that apparently substantial figure lies a considerably more fragile reality. Every one of those breeds is classified as being at risk of extinction because of the limited size of its existing population, according to the 2022 assessment of the risk status of Portuguese native breeds prepared within the framework of Portugal’s Common Agricultural Policy Strategic Plan.
The seven breeds constitute a remarkable biological and cultural portrait of the archipelago: Ramo Grande cattle, the Graciosa Donkey, the Terceira Pony, the Barbado da Terceira dog, the Cão de Fila de São Miguel, Brava dos Açores cattle and Gado Catrina. Some still number in the thousands. Others survive in populations so small that every birth, every breeding animal and every breeder willing to continue the lineage acquires particular importance. The Brava dos Açores currently has the largest population, with 2,662 animals, followed closely by Ramo Grande cattle, with 2,558. The Cão de Fila de São Miguel numbers 2,213 animals, while there are 1,327 Barbado da Terceira dogs. Then the figures fall dramatically: only 88 Terceira Ponies, 80 Gado Catrina and 61 Graciosa Donkeys. These are no longer merely agricultural statistics. They are numbers standing precariously at the frontier between continuity and disappearance.
Animals Made by Islands
The history of these breeds reaches back toward the settlement of the Azores themselves. Animals brought to the archipelago during the first centuries of human occupation entered environments unlike those from which they had come. The islands imposed their own conditions: humidity and wind, steep terrain, particular vegetation, volcanic soils, differences in altitude and climate and, above all, the profound consequences of geographic isolation. Generation followed generation, and adaptation slowly became inheritance. Over centuries, populations developed characteristics sufficiently distinctive that they eventually came to be recognized as part of the genetic heritage of the Azores. Their history therefore parallels that of the human communities that raised them: both were transformed by insularity, by necessity, by the particular demands of small territories surrounded by an immense sea.
Regional Secretary for Agriculture and Food António Ventura describes these breeds as “unique genetic assets of the Azores,” emphasizing that their importance extends beyond agriculture into educational, social and heritage dimensions. That distinction matters because once a native breed disappears, something considerably more complex than a particular appearance or agricultural function is lost. A genetic lineage formed through generations of adaptation cannot simply be reconstructed after extinction. We can restore a house from old photographs, rebuild a stone wall according to traditional methods, recover an abandoned path and even revive a forgotten song from written notation. Genetic heritage obeys a different law. Once its continuity is broken completely, restoration is no longer possible. The archive, in this case, is alive.
Ramo Grande: From the Fields into Cultural Memory
Among the seven breeds, Ramo Grande cattle offer one of the more encouraging examples. The population currently stands at 2,558 animals, with 263 registered breeders throughout the Azores. São Jorge alone accounts for 1,049 animals and 112 breeders, giving the island a particularly important role in preserving the breed. Ramo Grande cattle belong intimately to the agricultural history of the archipelago. Their traditional importance derived from their remarkable versatility: they were used for milk, meat and work. Before mechanization transformed Azorean agriculture, the ox was not simply livestock; it was energy, labor and, in many households, an indispensable part of economic survival. It pulled the cart, worked the earth and carried harvests along roads and lanes. Its strength entered the daily rhythm of rural existence and, inevitably, the cultural imagination of the islands.
That practical function has largely disappeared, but another form of survival has emerged. Traditional pairs of oxen, the juntas de bois, remain present in ethnographic parades and popular celebrations, particularly those associated with the Holy Spirit festivities. What was once indispensable agricultural technology has gradually become cultural heritage, and since 2021 the Regional Government has provided financial assistance specifically intended to preserve this tradition. The growth in participation is striking. In 2022, 30 beneficiaries maintaining 34 pairs of oxen received €14,500. A year later there were 42 beneficiaries and 46 pairs, supported by €19,300. In 2024, the figures rose to 57 beneficiaries and 72 pairs, with €29,600 in assistance. By 2025, 62 beneficiaries were maintaining 83 pairs of oxen, supported by €36,300. There is something quietly significant in those numbers: they record not the revival of an economically necessary technology but the deliberate decision of a community to keep a piece of its rural civilization alive.
The Smallest Numbers Carry the Greatest Warning
The situation becomes considerably more precarious when one turns to the rarest breeds. With only 61 animals, the Graciosa Donkey occupies the most numerically vulnerable position. Gado Catrina follows with 80 animals, and the Terceira Pony with 88. At such levels, conservation becomes a matter not merely of maintaining individual animals but of preserving viable breeding populations and sufficient genetic diversity for the breeds to possess a future. Their survival depends upon breeders willing to continue the lines, reproduction sufficient to sustain them and economic conditions that make preservation possible from one generation to the next.
Regional policy has consequently expanded financial support. Until 2025, specific assistance of this kind covered only Ramo Grande cattle. It has since been extended to Gado Catrina, the Graciosa Donkey and the Terceira Pony, with financial incentives awarded per animal. The logic recognizes one of the central difficulties involved in preserving traditional breeds: cultural importance does not necessarily produce economic viability. Modern agriculture tends toward productivity, specialization and efficiency. Native breeds, shaped under historical conditions for qualities such as hardiness, adaptability or multiple uses, may not always compete economically with highly specialized modern breeds. If society wants them to survive because they possess genetic, historical, environmental and cultural value, then their preservation cannot be left entirely to market forces. The breeder becomes, in effect, a custodian of an inheritance that belongs not only to the individual farm but to the collective memory of the islands.
Brava dos Açores: The Newest Recognition of an Older Heritage
The Brava dos Açores is the most recently classified of the archipelago’s native breeds and, with 2,662 animals, currently has the largest population among the seven. There are 35 breeders registered in its herd book, and their geographical distribution reveals the breed’s presence across several islands: Terceira has 21 breeders, São Jorge eight and Graciosa three, while Pico, São Miguel and Faial each have one. Its comparatively larger population does not, however, remove the breed from the extinction-risk classification. Indeed, that is one of the most important lessons contained in the regional figures: even populations that appear numerically stronger remain sufficiently limited for their long-term preservation to require sustained attention.
Numbers alone can deceive. Genetic conservation depends not simply upon how many animals exist at a particular moment, but upon breeding patterns, genetic diversity, the number of reproducing animals, continuity between generations and the willingness of breeders to maintain populations into the future. A breed can therefore possess several thousand living representatives and still remain vulnerable if its reproductive base is narrow or if the social and economic circumstances supporting its breeders begin to disappear. Conservation is not a photograph of the present population. It is the ability of that population to possess a future.
Biodiversity Is Also Cultural Memory
There is a tendency to think of biodiversity principally in terms of wild nature: seabirds nesting on inaccessible cliffs, endemic plants surviving in fragments of native forest, whales crossing Atlantic waters, rare species inhabiting volcanic lakes or coastal ecosystems. But the biodiversity of a place also includes the animals that human beings have lived alongside and shaped through centuries of husbandry. Native breeds inhabit an unusual territory between nature and culture. Their genetics are biological; their existence is historical. They are products of environmental adaptation, but also of human choices—what farmers selected, what communities needed, which characteristics proved useful in particular landscapes and which animals could endure the conditions of particular islands.
In that sense, the Ramo Grande ox belongs to Azorean heritage much as a traditional agricultural landscape does. The Graciosa Donkey is part of the history of Graciosa not because someone subsequently declared it picturesque, but because generations of human and animal lives intersected there. The Terceira Pony carries another fragment of that relationship. So do the Barbado da Terceira and the Cão de Fila de São Miguel, breeds whose very names have become inseparable from the geography that produced them. To preserve them is therefore to preserve more than genetic material. It is to preserve relationships between landscape and labor, between necessity and adaptation, between human communities and the animals that accompanied them through the long construction of island life.
The cultural dimension becomes especially visible in the case of the Ramo Grande oxen. Their economic world has largely vanished, but their symbolic world remains. When a traditional pair of oxen appears in a procession or ethnographic parade associated with the Holy Spirit celebrations, what passes along the street is not simply an animal display. For older generations, it may recall fields worked before tractors, carts traveling along parish roads, agricultural labor and a rhythm of life now transformed almost beyond recognition. For younger generations, it offers physical contact with a past they otherwise know only through photographs, stories and family memory. The animal becomes a living passage between historical time and the present.
When Extinction Means Irreversibility
Extinction is one of those words whose enormity can become dulled through repetition. Yet for a native breed its meaning is brutally simple: there is no second population somewhere else waiting to replace what has been lost. If a genetic lineage unique to the Azores disappears, the loss is not merely regional in sentiment; it is irreversible in biological terms. This explains the importance of combining genetic conservation with cultural recognition and economic support for breeders. Preserving these populations requires animals to reproduce, certainly, but it also requires people willing to raise them. And people will continue doing so only if preservation can coexist with the economic realities of contemporary life.
That is perhaps why the increasing participation in the program supporting traditional Ramo Grande ox teams is encouraging. It demonstrates that heritage can survive the disappearance of its original economic necessity when a community discovers another reason to value it. The ox no longer needs to pull the plow in order to possess meaning. Its presence in a Holy Spirit procession can connect a child watching from the roadside with an agricultural world known intimately by grandparents and great-grandparents. What has ceased to be necessary for survival can remain necessary for memory.
And therein lies the deeper significance of these seven breeds. The Azores have always been shaped by adaptation. Human beings adapted to islands; agriculture adapted to volcanic landscapes; communities adapted to isolation, weather and distance. The animals brought by the first generations of settlers adapted alongside them. Centuries later, those adaptations have names: Ramo Grande. Burro da Graciosa. Pónei da Terceira. Barbado da Terceira. Cão de Fila de São Miguel. Brava dos Açores. Gado Catrina.
Together they number 8,989 animals. Yet perhaps the most consequential figures are the smallest ones: 88, 80, 61. They remind us that heritage does not disappear only when buildings collapse, archives burn or traditions are forgotten. Sometimes it disappears quietly, one animal and one generation at a time, until the final living bearer of an inheritance is gone.
Protecting the native breeds of the Azores therefore means safeguarding something the islands spent centuries creating without ever deliberately setting out to create it: a living genetic memory of the encounter between animals, human beings and the Atlantic landscape. In their bodies survives something of the history of settlement, agriculture, work and adaptation; something of the long intimacy between islanders and the land from which they made their lives.
And unlike a ruined house that may someday be rebuilt, once that particular memory vanishes from the blood, no act of restoration can bring it home again.
Based on a story in Diário Insulare-José Llourenço-director-Photos from DI.