Vianesa
Brief description
Straight to sub-concave profile animals and medium sized. Average weight is 560 kg for females and 850 kg for males. The average height up to the withers is 132 cm for females and 138 cm for males.
Their coat is chestnut-coloured, with darker variations in oxen and lighter in steers. Darker colours are never missing in the limbs and extremities, but they are also intensely distributed around the various regions of the body giving rise to a varied presentation of the characteristics. Typical characteristics of this breed include lighter hairy, slightly sloping formations on the forehead, "mane", and the outer ear, "hanging". Short hooked horns with half moons in males, and longer in females, on which they sprout in front of the protruding line of the head, they grow sideways and then forward and up, to then make a wide spiral and end with the tips facing backwards. They are pearly coloured on the base and stem, with darkened tips. They have large, hairy ears.
Origin of the breed
The Vianesa breed is located in the "Terra do Bolo", in the west of the province of Ourense, bordering Sanabria (Zamora) and spreading out towards the Mounts of "Invernadoiro" and the Sierra de Queixa. The orographic conditions of this region, the most mountainous in the province, make agricultural mechanisation difficult and allow traditional farming systems to be maintained, needing animals greatly adapted to the environment, a fact which makes the Vianesa breed maintain the greatest census of all the Galician Browns.
Census
(on 31/12/2007): 1.362 animals.
Number of herds or farms (on 31/12/2007): 72.
Productive ability
The most appreciated quality of this breed is its rusticity, which allows its perfect adaptation to the mountainous environment that surround it, to which must be added the condition of a good dairy cow, which is converted into a high rate of growth of the steers, from which extremely high quality meat is produced.
