Iconic WA resort complex set to gallop away
For the children of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, El Caballo Blanco is a magical name that conjures up memories of stunning displays of prancing Spanish horses, riders dressed in flamboyant costumes and all the fun of the fair.
Back then, people in Perth would traipse out east to watch the dancing white stallion shows, have a meal, play on the go-kart track and water slides and then sometimes even stay the night in the adjoining motel.
“We’d often go there for a night out and have a drink and watch the show,” said local resident Tony Delich, 67. “Or you’d get a group of your friends together and all go and have dinner and watch.”
He was just one of an estimated quarter of a million people who went to see the troupe in its heyday in Wundowie, 60 kilometres outside the Perth CBD. The men of the troupe dressed in sequinned waistcoats and the women in flamenco gowns with mantillas pinned in their hair, performing with those renowned horses.
And it became so popular that its founder, local entrepreneur Ray Williams, who’d originally visited Spain and brought home an Andalusian stallion to mate with Australian horses and then started the equine theme park, set up a similar operation in south-west Sydney too, and then later took the show to Disneyland.
In 2007, however, the Sydney park closed and is now the home of a master‐planned community, The Hermitage, in the suburb of Gledswood Hills. And with the operation over west also long since closed, it is finally being sold off to developers as well.
Delich is the man these days handling the sale, too, as Knight Frank Perth’s agency director of investment sales. “The resort is on six hectares of land that’s zoned tourist,” he said. “It’s on a separate title and has function rooms, bars, a horse arena, a theatre, tennis courts, commercial kitchens, a swimming pool and 30 motel units.
“It could go to an operator who wants to convert it into a conference centre or a convention facility. There’s the El Caballo Golf Course next door, a beautiful championship course that’s privately-owned so that’s an asset nearby.”
On the other side of the golf course, there are another 39 hectares of land on which part of a lifestyle village has already been built for sale at the same time. It has development approval for 131 lifestyle lots, but only 38 homes have ever been built, with 34 of them sold to private owners.
The landholding was bought in 2020 for $12 million with the idea of building an Aboriginal community complex for up to 180 people there, but the idea has since been scrapped.
The two lots can be purchased together, or separately, via an expressions-of-interest campaign. Delich says he has no idea what the price might be … that’s being left completely to the market.
“The site has huge development potential, and there are lots of options to subdivide the land,” he said. “It’s impossible at this stage to put a price on it.”
