Associação Portuguesa do Cão de Castro Laboreiro (APCCL)
The Portuguese breed club for the Castro Laboreiro Dog, based in Castro Laboreiro.
About the Club
Background and role
The Associação Portuguesa do Cão de Castro Laboreiro is the breed club for the Castro Laboreiro Dog and it is based in Castro Laboreiro itself, the village in the far north of Portugal that gave the breed its name. It appears on the official list of breed clubs published by the Clube Português de Canicultura.
The club is the keeper of an event older than itself. The traditional competition at Castro Laboreiro, whose prize for dogs goes back to 1914, is still held every year on 15 August, and the club presents it as a cultural occasion as much as a canine one: the breed, in its words, is a product of how a people lived, of mountain country and of a particular kind of herding. In 2016 the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 competition was marked by breeders of the Cão da Serra da Estrela, honouring the two Portuguese breeds that were the first to be given standards.
Its main show is the breed Monográfica, held for the thirty-fourth time in Braga in November 2024 and required of dogs aspiring to the breed championship. The club also runs a voluntary breeding-stock evaluation programme graded in stages, and it publishes the yearly registration figures for the breed: 119 dogs registered in 2025 and 95 in each of the two preceding years, against 202 in 2015.
At the 2024 traditional competition the club honoured Professor Francisco Salvador Janeiro, recording that the international judge had already been judging at Castro Laboreiro in the 1980s.
Sources
Where this information comes from
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