Amistad Ranch, Florida
A Florida sporting ranch, and a map that has grown with the family for years
Amistad sits on 4,500 acres of Florida sporting country, a working driven game ranch the Fanjul family has shaped over decades: driven partridge, dove and quail courses, pheasant tower shooting alongside. J. Pepe Fanjul first commissioned the map in 2018, as a record of a place the family had made their own.
Run by a Sporting Hand
The ranch is run by Roy Green, who managed the Duke of Buccleuch's sporting estates for sixteen years before moving to Florida. Amistad fuses three sporting traditions on one property: pheasant tower shooting, quail hunting, and driven partridge, the last of these almost unique in America. Roy's experience shaped how the map records all of it, the drives and their running order, the peg numbers, the dog-handling routes, the position of every blind and tower, set down the way a sporting manager would expect to see them.
The Names, Walked Out on the Ground
On British estates, fields and woods have carried their names for generations; in America the tradition is less common. Many of the names on the Amistad map were chosen with Pepe and Roy on the ground, walking the country together. Pepe led. He knew the places that mattered: the corner where one of his children shot their first quail, the meadow where another spent long afternoons, the patch of ground a grandchild had claimed as their own. Each became a named feature. The names were not invented. They were recognised, and recorded.
The Map
Anthony spent a sustained period on the ranch for the original survey, walking the country, riding out with the keepering team, and hunting with the family to learn how the quail, partridge and pheasant shoots are actually run. The decorative map measures nine feet by five, drawn at 1:5,000 so that every one of the more than sixteen thousand individual trees could be placed exactly. The illustrations, by the artist Jonathan Pointer, include the family home, the working dogs, the local wildlife and the family's vintage Rolls Royce that doubles as a gun bus. And somewhere in the cartography, as on every map, Anthony has hidden a small detail, here a tiny Labrador, for the grandchildren to find one day. Printed and framed in London and flown to Florida by Momart, the fine-art shippers, it hangs in the family's home with a framed, condensed history of the ranch alongside.
“As the ranch and shoot have developed over the years, so we have been able to update it with new ground and new drives.”
A Living Record
The map has been updated five times since 2018. The family have acquired neighbouring land, reshaped the landscape, and built new barns, stables and infrastructure, and each major change brings a new version, printed and framed in London and flown out by Momart in a case built for the delivery. The framing was designed so the older versions stay in place behind the new ones: a time capsule for future generations. The map is not a single deliverable but a living record of a ranch still being built. Around six framed copies have been made for the family, for offices, homes and yachts; wherever Pepe goes, a piece of the ranch goes with him.
Amistad is profiled in Maps to Treasure by Jonathan Young, former Editor-in-Chief of The Field, in the October 2025 Field & Country issue of Quest Magazine. To discuss a commission of your own, please get in touch.
