Equestrian center develops from a childhood memory
Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007
By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer
CONNELLY SPRINGS - Decades ago, when Oscar Vasquez was a boy living in El Salvador, he would play with the work horses on his grandfather's tiny farm.
Then, one day, the fair came through Vasquez's town.
"The people who had money would show off, and there was this guy who rode a black stallion," Vasquez said. "And I was just `whoa,' you know? He was such a beautiful animal."
Years later, that memory sparked the idea for a community on Lake Rhodhiss, a 320-lot development in Burke County called Paradise Harbor.
Vasquez said he envisions residents riding horses across the development's 873 acres, through wooded trails behind their homes and along the water.
Vasquez started developing the land, which curves along Lake Rhodhiss, in June 2004, and started selling lots about four months later. In November 2006, the first resident finished building his home and moved in.
"There's a need for that," Vasquez said. "There's a lot of people who want to have horses, and it seemed like a good way to market the property."
Vasquez, a 50-year-old former fisherman, has been developing properties across the Unifour for more than 15 years, starting with 10-acre developments and gradually moving to larger projects with hundreds of lots, some as big as 14 acres.
When Vasquez was 15, he moved from El Salvador to Texas and began working on a shrimp boat. Later, when he was living in Florida and fishing for scallops, Vasquez met a woman from Whitnel and soon began visiting her in Caldwell County.
The relationship didn't work out, but Vasquez liked the area, with its rolling mountains, and decided to move here and get his contractor's license.
In 2001, he decided to focus solely on waterfront properties and began developing land on Lake Hickory and Lake James.
The equestrian angle on Lake Rhodhiss, he said, was inspired by a lifelong attraction to horses and the 40 mares and stallion Paso Finos he keeps at his private Caldwell County farm, Rancho de Sueños, or "Ranch of Dreams."
"I worked very hard for a few years, and then I saw a Paso Fino, and it reminded me of the horse I saw at the fair," he said. "I found what I was looking for."
The Caldwell County ranch, which he bought about 10 years ago, features a two-story clubhouse and a 26-stall barn and is the prototype Vasquez plans to use when he begins construction on the equestrian center at Paradise Harbor in about six weeks.
The center, he said, will also include riding rinks, a bathhouse and grooming stables. Residents, who are required by law to have at least 3 acres before they can keep a horse, could either board horses at the center or ride any of the 20 Paso Finos Vasquez plans to bring from Rancho de Sueños, he said.
Prices range from $107,000 for some interior 1.5-acre lots to more than $450,000 for a 5-acre lot on the water. As of Monday, the company, N.C. Lakefront Properties, had sold 102 waterfront lots and 23 interior lots, said sales manager Cathy Crisp.
Three months ago, Scott Nelson's family was the first to move into Paradise Harbor, and since then two more houses have been built and a fourth is nearly completed. For Nelson, the community's biggest draw was the lakefront property, he said.
But with two daughters, ages 5 and 13, Nelson said, the equestrian center might be something his girls would use. "We have family members that ride," he said. "It's a nice feature."
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