Horseback Riding with Certified Guide

We travelled from Malaga to the stable by public transport, which takes about 2 hours. I knew in advance that the English tour guide wasn’t available, so we would get a Spanish guide. I thought this would be okay, since my Spanish is pretty good. More about this later. When we arrived, we rang the doorbell and the big gate opened. We weren’t greeted by anybody by the door (except for a very cute dog) and had to walk further onto the property to see if we could find someone. We had to strike up a conversation to confirm that the tour was happening. We think this could have been handled better. The person that met us didn’t speak English, but he was kind and gave us brushes to prep the horses, which we liked. We were very enthusiastic about the condition of the stable and the horses. Everything looked very clean, the horses looked beautiful and healthy. We were not briefed at all (also not in Spanish) and they did not really go into how much experience we had. They just gave us a horse, took us to a very small riding arena to get on to the horse and had us ride around for about 5 minutes. Then, the tour guide appeared, didn’t introduce himself but seemed nice, and told us to follow him on the horse. We went out to the area we would ride through and started the “tour”. The reason this is in parentheses, is because it wasn’t much of a tour. The tour guide just drove in front of us, made some small talk at times and was a nice person, but didn’t really check on us or give us any tips. Sometimes, when the horses started trotting suddenly, he wouldn’t tell us how to get the horse under control, or most of the time he wouldn’t even notice if the horse seemed like it was sidetracked. This made us feel pretty uncomfortable, like we would be on our own if something happened. All in all, the ride was finished pretty quickly (in about 45 minutes). This was pretty disappointing to us, since we travelled pretty far and paid a fair amount of money. When we came back to the stable, they just gestured to us where to put the horses and told us we could get off the horses (again, without any help or tips, which can be pretty daunting for someone with not a lot of experience). Before we knew, the tour guide was gone and no one told us if this was the end of the “tour”. We had to ask them whether we were finished and if we could leave. Long story short, a beautiful stable where you can really see that the horses are taken care of; kind people, but absolutely not worthy of the “certified tour”-title.