These lovely figures started life as Minifig s-series Spanish lancers, or Garrochistas. Before Don Julián was esteemed enough to outfit his squadron with matching uniforms, he rose through the ranks of a modest band of Guerillas made up of irregular Garrochistas, essentially Spanish mounted cow handlers.
The original lances were cast on and had more akin to a telephone pole than a lance, so I replaced it with an in-between wire lance, that still retained some thickness to match the robustness of the figure, but not so thin as to be scale accurate. The next decision was whether or not to cut down the base, which to my eye was simply too large for the figure. In the end, aesthetics won out over preserving the figure integrity (besides, as RG pointed out, I had already trimmed off the lances), so out came the clippers and voila, a more Hinton Hunt style and size of base. Hopefully those two modifications will help the figure nestle in amongst the smaller Hinton Hunts without too mush to draw the eye toward the discrepancy.
The Minifig s-series Spanish Napoleonic range was a very small one, but thank goodness for these Garrochistas! It took awhile to find the seven I have, thanks to some lucky finds and the help of friends, but I really only wanted a small squadron of them anyway, so all is well. For more info on the range you can see some on the much missed and esteemed Clive Smither's blog:
https://minifigssrange.blogspot.com/search?q=Spanish
Without further ado, I give you the Lanceros de Castilla
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| El Charro himself |
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| Whenever I take pictures and blow them up for a blogpost, I invariably find a mistake or something I forgot. In this case it is tan hooves for El Charros horse. As I type this his horse's hooves are drying after a fresh coat of paint! |
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| There was a small unit of cavalry present at the battle of Mesas de Ibor, so these will do just the trick. Now that they are complete, along with the Spanish artillery, I only need to refurb four more Spanish infantry battalions from the Dick Tennant collection and they will finally be able to hit the battlefield! |
For more information on the Lanceros de Castilla, visit these lovely websites:
https://littlewars.se/spanish/index.html
https://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2018/04/spanish-garrochistas-lancers.html
