July 25, 2020

Las Corridas a Plaza Partida







La corrida de toros es un evento en el que se lidian toros bravos, a pie o a caballo en un rec...into cerrado para tal fin, la plaza de toros. Hace tiempo se realizaron corridas dobles en las que se dividía la mitad el ruedo, se denominaron Corridas a Plaza partida.

Estos festejos pese a la creencia de muchos, son un hecho real. Sin embargo, y a causa de mayor costo y trabajo que demanda el presentar las dos corridas a la vez, es muy difícil volver a ver este espectáculo a pesar de la satisfacción y el agrado que han dejado estos festejos.

El primero de ellos se celebró el 12 de Julio de 1835. Se lidiaron 10 toros, los 4 primeros a plaza entera y los 6 restantes a plaza partida, levantándose la barrera divisoria en breve tiempo. Cuatro toros eran de la viuda de Montero y los 6 restantes de Don José M. Albareda, también de El Puerto, siendo lidiados por Juan Hidalgo, de San Fernando (Cádiz) y Luis Rodríguez, de Sevilla, actuando de media espada José Díaz “Mosquita”, de Cádiz y de sobresaliente Francisco Benítez “El Panadero”.

El segundo fue el 1 de septiembre de 1.867, lidiándose 7 toros, 4 de Núñez Pardo y tres de Eduardo Shelly. En primer lugar se corrieron 3 a plaza entera que fueron estoqueados por Antonio Sánchez “El Tato”, y después se dividió el ruedo con la valla correspondiente y en competencia de ganaderías se lidiaron a uno y a otro lado los 4 restantes por el gaditano José Ponce y el cordobés Manuel Fuentes “Bocanegra”. Estos dos primeros festejos de los que se tienen noticias, se celebraron en plaza de madera en los terrenos del Ejido de San Francisco, en el mismo lugar donde está construida la actual plaza en España.

La tercera corrida a plaza partida se celebró el 2 de septiembre de 1883. Se lidiaron 8 toros de la ganadería de Ignacio Martín que fueron lidiados por Hermosilla, Labi, Bocanegra y Mazantini. Los 4 primeros toros se lidiaron a plaza normal y los restantes a plaza partida.

El siguiente festejo tuvo lugar el 6 de agosto de 1922. Fue una novillada con 8 toros de D. Francisco Molina. En primer lugar se lidiaron los 4 primeros novillos a plaza partida y los 4 restantes a plaza normal, previamente en el descanso se había desmontado las vallas. Actuaron Francisco Redondo, de Chiclana de la Frontera (Cádiz) y el asturiano Miguel Casielles. A plaza normal lidiaron el gaditano José Amuelo y el sevillano Domingo Correas Montes.

Año después, se celebró otra corrida el 31 de agosto de 1958; en esta ocasión fueron 6 toros y 6 novillos, todos ellos de D. Carlos Núñez de Tarifa (Cádiz) que fueron lidiados por Rafael Ortega, Gregorio Sánchez y Juan Antonio Romero, los toros, mientras los novilleros fueron Pepa Alvarez, Emilio Oliva y Rafael de Paula. En esta ocasión el desfile de las cuadrillas se hicieron por puertas distintas y recorridos diferentes, habiendo doble puerta de toriles.

El 14 de julio de 1995 se celebra el sexto y, hasta el momento, último festejo de este tipo. Se corrieron 6 toros de los Herederos de Cebada Gago para los matadores Francisco Núñez “Currillo”, Oscar Higares y Víctor Puerto, y seis novillos de Viento Verde, propiedad de los Hnos. Peralta, para José Luis Moreno, Gil Belmonte y Víctor Manuel.

Las corridas a plaza partida fueron eventos que, como antes se mencionó, eran complicados en operación y administrativamente pero que, sin lugar a dudas, llamaron la atención por ser diferentes y atractivos para la Afición.

Por Lu Llanos.

Fuente: Plaza Real 1968. Manuel Martinez

 

Plaza de toros Santander



foto por Diego Siquieres

July 23, 2020

El Cid en Santander


July 30th, 2016 with the bull Madronito of the Adolfo Martin ranch. The bull was given the indulto due to its bravery.

El Cid


Love the red suit of lights, with black trim and a gold vest underneath.

July 22, 2020

Toros en el campo de Salamanca








Beautiful photos by Gonzalo Escobar, taken on the Barcial ranch.

Barcial - creado a patir de una mezcla muy personal con vacas de Veragua y sementales de Santa Coloma, el encaste Vega-Villar ha sido perpetuado en el tiempo gracias a la familia Cobaleda. Afianzandose en los festejos de novillos, la quinta generacion de Barcial sigue e la lucha de devolver a esta divisa a los carteles de las grandes feridas de las que fue relegada.

July 20, 2020

Pamplona’s spectacular bull-runs are too often misunderstood

“I’d much rather be a Spanish fighting bull than a farm cow”

(by Alexander Fiske-Harrison telegraph.co.uk 7-20-20)

I left the site of my last Andalusian postcard with a heavy heart and burning ears: apparently some locals had taken offence to the “elitist” connotations of my comparison of their town to Notting Hill. People take things the wrong way with a vengeance nowadays: as with Montparnasse in Paris, the artists that first made Notting Hill famous were followed by richer creative-types and the resulting economic gear-change had both upsides and downsides.

Notably, though, these complaints were British ex-pats. The Spanish were delighted, with the Mayor of the town, a socialist, writing to say how much he looked forward to hosting Telegraph readers.

After Gaucín, for the first time in a decade I did not know where to go in Spain mid-July. Normally, I would head north to Pamplona for the Feria of San Fermín, known here simply as Fiesta.

Some people think running with bulls, a pastime for which that city is most famous, is dangerous and anachronistic, and the end place of that run, the bull-ring, is a place of torture and death. And indeed, all Spain’s bull rings are registered abattoirs – they have to be, because the carcass of every bull ends up in the food chain. The only difference, in terms of the bull’s welfare, is the manner and duration of their life and the manner and duration of their death, but perhaps not in the way readers think.

A fighting bull presented for a corrida de toros, which the English horribly mistranslate as a ‘bullfight’ – erroneously co-opting our own old word for bull-baiting with dogs – must be between four and six years of age as opposed to the average age for a meat animal’s execution which is 18 months.

The quality of that more than triple lifespan is also wildly different, quite literally: in order to build the instinct and muscle which is required in the ring, they are reared wild, in the meadows and forests of over 1,300 fighting bull ranches, which comprise one fifth of Spain’s natural landscape.

I’ve visited two dozen of the largest and oldest of them, and having grown up among cattle in East Anglia – before training in zoology as an undergraduate – I can say without hesitation that the environmental difference in biodiversity is striking. And it is paid for by the tenfold premium on the meat the animals provide, supplied directly by the box-office of the plaza de toros.

As great is the difference in type and behaviour of these feral Iberian bovines compared to the black and white boxes of meat-and-milk on legs we rear and kill for our entertainment in Britain. And there is no denying what we outside the world of bullfighting do is for entertainment – meat is medically unnecessary and is consumed for flavour alone. Three and a half million of them die annually to entertain our palates, whether or not we want to admit it, and whether or not we have the honesty to watch it.

It is, I decided after two years researching for my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, a rather subjective matter – as all ethical and political matters become when thought about deeply enough – whether or not queuing in the abattoir for hours for the humanity of the ‘humane’ killer is a better death than charging into the unknown world of the ring, horns raised and hide prickling to the challenge, only to die, inevitably, on the steel of a Spanish matador, who plays the role of priest in this strange sacrificial rite.

I know what I would chose for myself after studying both – Give me a shot: at my killer that he might join the ranks of the half thousand bullfighters who have died on the sand, and at winning over the audience that they might petition the president of the ring to allow me to join far higher number of bulls pardoned to become breeding animals for the rest of their natural days.

As entertainment, the Coliseum is only barbaric when compared to Butlins, not when compared to the death camps for cattle which supply everywhere from McDonalds to The Ivy.

Of course, these are the negative arguments, the positive ones can only come to an English-speaker later, after one has seen and studied what manner of performance this is.

Once one has realised that this is a ritual sacrifice of no greater, nor lesser, moral importance than the slaughterhouse, one asks: what good can come out of it? What is this intricate moving sculpture of man and beast conforming to a centuries old dance-book of ‘passes’ in which the human seeks to impose elegance upon ferocity, and risks his body to do so. Every matador is gored on average once a year, and only modern medicine has reduced the mortality rate that results, although I have written two obituaries for matadors I knew in the past four years.

While in the south they feel the same about such anarchy without artistry taking place en mass in the street. I happen to enjoy the two, both as spectator and practitioner. I even wrote a second book, The Bulls Of Pamplona, with a foreword by the mayor of that city, and chapters by other aficionados like John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest, Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson.

However, there is more to Pamplona, the capital city of Spanish Navarre, than los toros. Its original fame and wealth came from its position on Europe’s most important surviving pilgrimage, El Camino de Santiago, ‘The Way Of Saint James’.

I walked it in the cold of January this year – before a virus made being a hermit rather than a pilgrim the only true virtue – from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrénées and crossing the Roncevaux pass where Roland was slain rear-guarding Charlemagne’s retreating army, as recorded in the oldest work of French literature, The Song of Roland. The views along the walk are extraordinary at any time of year, and the welcome in Pamplona just as grand.

The great pearl of the city – literally, Gran Hotel La Perla – is Hemingway’s old hotel redressed in five-star clothing on the grand Plaza del Castillo, at the other end of which is the Hotel Europa, which has a Michelin-starred restaurant. (For a more reasonably priced and modern hotel, there is La Maisonnave on Calle Nueva, ‘New Street’, nearby.)

For tapas, calle San Nicolás is well worth a walk along, my favourite being La Mandarra de la Ramos, and the famous Café Iruña on the grand Plaza del Castillo, along with the Anglo-Bullrunners’ Bar Txoko at the other end of the same plaza .

For the best burgers in Spain – perhaps in Europe – head towards the Burger King on calle Mercaderes and take a sharp left just before you reach it into Iruñazarra and eat a bovine that still tastes like the animal from which it came on the bull-run itself. For more formal fare, El Búho, ‘The Owl’, has the best views over the plains from this medieval walled city-upon-a-hill, while the traditional choices of the Otano and the Olaverri (again, meat like meat should be), still remain when so many others have tragically closed their doors and extinguished their fires.

And with this final postcard, I leave Spain back to return to England and see how my homeland has fared in these troubled times.

As the bull-runners’ poem has it:

Farewell to fiesta, farewell to the sun,
The candles are burned down and the bulls are all done.

Though the shrine’s empty and the altars are bare,
We know the way back now and will return there.

As we grow older and some of us fall,
We’ll still lift our glasses and toast to us all.

For fiesta is in us, and those who we love,
Those still among us, and those up above.

--------------------

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/articles/andalusia-pamplona-bull-fiesta-farewell/

July 16, 2020

Fallece la emblemática ganadera Ana Romero

(mundotoro.com 7-15-20)

La importante ganadera Doña Ana Romero Reguera de Carrasco ha muerto esta madrugada a los 88 años de edad en su domicilio de El Puerto de Santa María. La fundadora del emblemático hierro de los Santacolomas, vía Alipio Pérez Tabernero y Joaquín Buendía, falleció de manera repentina, según ha podido saber Mundotoro de fuentes cercanas a la familia.

La misa funeral tendrá lugar este jueves a las 11 de la mañana en la Iglesia Nuestra Señora de las Nieves de Jerez de la Frontera. Su hijo Lucas Carrasco Romero llevaba desde hace varios años las riendas de la divisa.

En 1958, doña Ana Romero Reguera de Carrasco decide crear una ganadería y, para ello, realiza una compra de ganado a Antonio Pérez López de Tejada. No conforme con el resultado de estos animales terminará por deshacerse de estos lotes y adquirir vacas procedentes de las ganaderías de Alipio Pérez-Tabernero las cuales cubre con sementales «santacoloma» del hierro de Joaquín Buendía, según informa El Mundo.

De esta manera, se conforma la línea actual que conservan los herederos de Ana Romero, concretamente su hijo don Lucas Carrasco Romero. Sin embargo, proviene de la ganadería de José Antonio Adalid, conformada por reses de origen Vistahermosa y Barbero de Utrera. Aquellos toros pasaron, en 1902, a manos de Francisco Taviel de Andrade y desde ahí a manos de Gregorio Campos, pasando por sucesivas compras hasta llegar a 1950, cuando son adquiridas por Arturo Pérez Fernández. Será este ganadero quien, tres años después, en 1953, decida repartir las reses en cinco lotes, uno para cada uno de sus hijos; el cual terminará por comprar Ana Romero al inicio de su andadura ganadera.

En los últimos años han refrescado a la ganadería dos toros de Rehuelga. El gran juego de esta ganadería en la plaza ha estado en parte eclipsada por la trágica cogida del toro ‘Marqués’ a Juan José Padilla en octubre de 2011 en la plaza de Zaragoza. El diestro jerezano, gran amigo de la casa, decidió volver a torear unos meses después para estoquear dos hermanos de camada del toro que le había corneado. Espantó a los fantasmas y volvió a los ruedos desde 2012 hasta 2018.

https://www.mundotoro.com/noticia/fallece-la-emblematica-ganadera-ana-romero/1557635

Carteles de Beziers




July 14, 2020

Arenes de Beziers, France




Something different about this plaza de toros is they have light posts down close to the ring.

The strength of the bull


A bull tears a burladero right out of the ground in Ronda.