And every January the world arrives. For roughly twelve to thirteen weeks each winter, Wellington becomes the center of international horse sport — show jumping, hunter/jumper, and dressage in the show rings, and Sunday polo on the club fields — with riders from all fifty states and more than thirty countries, and some twenty thousand horses stabled across the village's seven hundred-plus farms. The Winter Equestrian Festival anchors the season, and an entire winter economy of grooms, trainers, vets, and farriers moves in with it. The strawberry fields are long gone, but the harvest never left; it just changed shape.
Wellington is the self-styled Winter Equestrian Capital of the World — at the height of the winter season some 20,000 horses are stabled in the village, served by 700-plus horse farms.
Why People Visit Wellington Florida
Wellington is the Winter Equestrian Capital of the World and one of South Florida's most distinctive towns: a place built on the reclaimed swampland of a Harvard aviator's Flying Cow Ranch, the one-time world's largest strawberry patch, now home to tens of thousands of horses every winter. It blends horse-country culture with Everglades-edge wildlife preserves and wetland parks — show jumping, dressage, and polo on one side, boardwalks and birdwatching towers on the other. From the C.O.W. ranch and the strawberry fields to the bridle trails and the polo grounds, history and everyday culture sit side by side. Strawberry patch to horse country. The winter capital of the riding world.
