Although the world has shifted drastically over the last few hundred years, bullfighting has stood its ground. But why does it endure and for how much longer?
(by Edd Norval medium.com 4-17-20)
First Tercio — Personal Experience
The sun cast an ovular shadow over Las Ventas as the arena began to fill up with families, tourists and old Spanish men with cooler boxes and cushions. Pigeons soared over the heads of the crowd, doing laps around the ring and sporadically settling on the pristine sand below that the groundsmen had made sure was firm, picturesquely raked, ready for the blood.
As arena staff drew the lines of the outer and inner circle, shouts echoed from everywhere, old friends and new ones, looking for each other and most importantly, the vendor with the cold beers. The seats were uncomfortable, like those in an old Roman debating room, flat stone steps terraced all the way down. Having been unaware of what tickets to buy, or their relevance, we were quickly in the shade as the unforgiving sun bid us adieu behind the Neo-Mudéjar boxes imagined by architect José Espeliú.
The first matador since the turn of the century had been killed the day before, so the evening’s proceedings began with a minute’s silence in his respect, casting a somber tone that kept pace with the dying of the light. Victor Barrio was 29 at the time of his death, an impressive matador who had learned his trade only a few years before, in this very ring.
Tonight’s matadors were about to face their bull in the eyes in front of the constantly swelling crowd in the hottest month of Madrid. They were calm and elegant in their traditional dress and displayed a theatrical sorrow, akin to Shakespearean thesps in a tragic scene, during the minute silence. Such a display should be expected of men who choose the theatre of death as their stage.
The crowd remained silent as hand-painted signs of remembrance for Barrio were held aloft, unmoving in the stagnant humid air. All pigeons had dispersed, almost as if they had a hunch, like dogs, of what was to come. There were no illusions. We all knew what we had paid to see, a thought quickly interrupted as the traditional metal horns rang out, breaking the calm. The first bull, weighing in at just over 500kg was being led out.
As a first-timer, I can’t claim to have understood the intricacies of the ceremony — which will be explained correctly later — so have chosen to write with the parlance largely of an outsider. As theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote, “No public spectacle in the world is more technical, offers less to the untaught observer, than a bullfight.” The first duel was uneventful. The matador was young, bedecked in his dazzling traje de luces, but the bull was lazy — the creature seemed to die in vain and I immediately began to feel uneasy at the thought of five more similar performances.
After the second fight passed, I understood the procession better. The killing seemed more ceremonious after that. I recognised the red flag, just as the bull eventually does too. Each and every one of us in the crowd had one. The thing we know might hurt us, yet that we can’t help but charge towards. It was our primal desire to connect to life beyond the repetitive and monotonous. To experience something cathartic, Holy, real.
Washing over me was a sense that the act was transformative and that I, a man who was simply a curious tourist a mere hour before, had been enveloped into the bosom of something that transported every atom of my body. Bette Ford, an actress who later became a bullfighter wrote of this experience, “Bullfighting is anachronistic — you enter into a bullring and you’re leaving behind the values of the world outside the ring. I suppose that what I would want to acknowledge is that perhaps the tension, the crucial tension, isn’t necessarily between the view of bullfighting as a tradition versus as an art form, but between the values inside the ring and the values outside the ring.”
Some of the rules seemed fluid at first as I tried to get my head around it, like they changed each fight. To confirm the ideas I’d stitched together of the procession, I approached a family that sat in front of us — a woman, a man and their three or four children. The woman spoke the best English and acted as my guide. Like me, they too were strangers in a foreign land, although unlike me, they had made a life for themselves nearby. Bullfighting was something they’d seen before, a semi-regular family event.
Each duel has an identical structure like the iambic pentameter of a Shakespearean sonnet. Toreros work within this framework, their individuality and artistic flourishes acting as a kind of signature. In the three scene act, each story plays out differently.
In each corrida, there are six bulls and with each bull the proceedings are highly ritualised containing three tercios (thirds/stages) — varas (pikes), banderillas (little harpoons) and muerte (death). There are also two suertes (parts) distinguished by the capote (cape) used. The first two tercios feature the larger pink capote and the second suerte, coinciding with the ultimate tercio is the muleta — the small scarlet cloth used in the bull’s death.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a journalist who trained as matador and subsequently has become a general aficionado of taurine events, describes the dramatic elements in a corrida he attended with matador El Cid, after the second act which, “passes as it so often does in the theatre, of necessity for the development of plot and character, but with neither the novelty and energy of the first, nor the pathos and grandeur of the last.” Far from lacking excitement, the tercio de banderillas is a fine art unto itself, but as he states, lacks something fundamental that the other two tercios have.
The youngest child of the family in front — the only boy — did not like what he saw. His protests became evident to the parents and the father removed him from the ring. He saw the violence, the death, the pain and heard the claps that rung out parallel to what he was seeing. Overwhelmed by the sights, the cognitive dissonance, the boy and his father never returned, nor I imagine, ever would.
It was the 10th of July, 2016. Besides the bullfight, it was the Euro 2016 final. My friend and I grew up in Scotland, a country where religion and community have subsided to create a void, one which football fills. In a search for meaning we, collectively, found it in a rectangular patch of grass. So, on such an occasion, despite our national team’s predictable absence from the tournament we’d promised ourselves to leave in time for the final. Our time at Las Ventas was coming to an end. When I remembered this fact half-way through, I protested. I didn’t want to leave this behind and I didn’t know why. Something about it gripped me.
Whilst the cruelty of the spectacle remains the strongest arguments against it — the history and tradition, the glimpse into the past, is what its fans, or aficionados, repel the notion. Ernest Hemingway posed in Death in the Afternoon, “anything capable of arousing passion in its favour will surely raise as much passion against it.” Is Hemingway trying to understand, like I am hoping to, the why of this ancient tradition? To untangle the hypocrisy and make sense of its enduring position in society?
In the penultimate performance, the matador thrusts the estoque down into the bull, dropping its heaving mass as it punctures the aorta. Cascading rivers of blood pour from the bull's mouth, agape and agasp, clinging to any last form of life as the precise perforation empties the bull of its vitality. My friend and I look at each other. Quietly, we leave.
Second Tercio — Wider Perspective
If the violence and cruelty are what people don’t like. What do they like? The corrida de toros is a highly ritualised affair, offering a sense of attachment to the past for viewers. The Plaza do Toros, where the events take place, are a sanctuary for many from the fast-paced post-industrial life around them. It’s as yet untouched by the coca-colonisation of a Spain rapidly transitioning from dictatorship to democracy.
Bullfighting in Spain it’s known as la fiesta nacional — the national festival. To the dwindling fans and participants, it is symbolically representative of their nation, the individualising marker between her and her neighbours. As such, it has become a largely nationalistic spectacle, ardently protected by people and politicians with nationalist leanings, a trend that has enjoyed a great upswing in popular support over the last five years, yet is only a recent shift in the politicisation of bullfighting.
Spanish bullfighting has ancient roots, steeped in the mythologised Mediterranean societies and Mesopotamia whose reverence for the bull went beyond the object of veneration to a symbol of divinity. How we understand the corrida do toros now is linked to an ancient poem — the Epic of Gilgamesh. The scene in which the Bull of Heaven dies is described thusly, “The Bull seemed indestructible, for hours they fought, till Gilgamesh dancing in front of the Bull, lured it with his tunic and bright weapons, and Enkidu thrust his sword, deep into the Bull’s neck, and killed it”. The similarities it bears to the contemporary bullfight is striking.
Bullfighting is a common misnomer, although it’s how we often refer to it, including in this article. The true name — corrida de toros — translates literally as ‘coursing of bulls’, a type of running hunt. Tracing back to the Ancient Roman practice of Venationes, entertainment carried out in Amphitheatres whereby wild animals are hunted, gives a clue as to its identity in both name and also, in the architectural style of the plazas built to house the events.
A sort of historical reenactment, coupled with other Roman games, bullfighting made it from Rome to Spain — widely thought of as being introduced by Emperor Claudius as a substitution for gladiatorial combat during a period it was banned. Adopted by noblemen and royalty, bullfighting was initially entertainment at ceremonious events in the Middle Ages — an equivalent to knights jousting or nowadays, something as bland as a live covers band. Beyond entertainment — reputation and favour were at stake. It remained a pastime of the rich and royal, from Charlemagne to Alfonso X the Wise. Spanish folk hero, ‘El Cid’ the knight, was one of its most famous participants.
It wasn’t until around 1726, almost a millennium after Charlemagne enjoyed the spectacle, that it became recognisable to what we see today. Francisco Romero introduced fighting the bull on foot, rather than mounted, and using the muleta in the final stage with the slightly curved estoque sword for the final blow. The practice was no longer just for noblemen, but commoners too. Bullfighting began to take shape, particularly as dedicated arenas began to be constructed.
Whisker-distance daring and bullfighting set the spectacle on its contemporary trajectory when pioneering matador Juan Belmonte, regarded as the greatest ever to live, emerged. Belmonte is immortalised in two of Ernest Hemingway’s books, Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises. Previous matadors kept the animal at a distance. Belmonte seemed to welcome the thrill, drawing gasps from crowds throughout his career — the first of the rockstar toreros.
Frequently gored, a result of his derring-do in the arena, Belmonte’s body was battered upon his retirement. Diagnosed with a heart condition and advised not to ride his beloved horses, Belmonte, after a cancer diagnosis, chose to ride his favourite horse out around his ranch one final time, aged 70. Upon returning, like his friend Hemingway only months before, Belmonte committed suicide by gunshot. His legacy bore an indelible mark on the future of bullfighting.
Understanding its history helps to contextualise its presently jarring position in contemporary discourse. In Spain, for some time, it has been a divisive and contentious topic, only recently returning to the fore due to the rise in nationalistic and identitarian politics which has latched onto bullfighting as a sort of cause célèbre. Before exploring these aspects further, it’s worth understanding the numbers that act as their foundation.
The Spanish government began compiling statistics on bullfighting in 2003. From their findings, we can see that as of 2018, the number of events including bulls dropped by 2.3%, bullfighting itself by 4.7%. When the Ministry of Culture and Sport used 2003 as their benchmark year, where there were 1,947 events, it actually grew up until the 2008 global economic crash to a peak of 3,651 before a steady decline taking it to last year’s lowest-yet recorded statistics. Still, in four Spanish regions, it continued to grow up to 2018’s records; in Castilla-La Mancha, Valencia, Navarra and La Rioja, showing a fairly even geographical spread across the country.
There is nothing clear-cut about these findings though. Bullfighting critic for El País newspaper Antonio Lorca considers “Spain’s attitude toward bullfighting is increasingly confused and confusing.” Polls by the paper detail that 60% of those asked dislike bullfighting, whilst hypocritically more than half were against its outright prohibition. Particularly those in the older generation who more readily acknowledge its economic and cultural value.
Younger people’s values have shifted towards a global perspective and as such, their opinions have been shaped — even on issues pertaining to Spanish life and identity — by non-Spanish people whose opinions are shared online. In 2018, government statistics show that only 8% of the population attended an event with a bull, only 5.9% actually attended a corrida. It is, as Lorca said, very complex.
Asked to rank their interest in bullfighting on a scale of 0–10, 65% ranked it between 0–2. Dividing the demographic further by age, it rose from 72.1% to 76.4% for people aged 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 respectively. The picture this paints is of bullfighting as an archaic form of entertainment. An Ipsos MORI poll in 2016 states that, for adults, 19% supported it, whilst 58% opposed it.
In Spain, bullfighting isn’t considered a sport, as it’s often mislabelled a ‘blood sport’, a tag aficionados take issue with, interpreting it as misleading and dismissive of its artistry and history. Rather, the corrida is seen as a part of art and culture, with events being reviewed in this section of El País, next to theatre and ballet, not in the sports section beside football. It stands to reason that both theatre and ballet have scored similar in polls regarding attendance and interest.
Writers in support of bullfighting are clear to distinguish the difference between the corrida and other bull-related events which are often wrongly lumped together. In bullfighting, there exists the romantic lens of an aesthetic worldview, an opinion that doesn’t stretch to one particularly controversial annual event in Tordesillas, the Toro de la Vega — which amounts to little more than the Pamplona Bull Run in reverse.
In this small town, hundreds chase down a bull armed with lances and often mounted on horseback, thrusting their sharpened blades into the frightened animal whenever it is in reach. It’s a medieval spectacle of brutality and gore, bereft of the artistic merit of its more refined companion.
Much of bullfighting’s negative imagery comes from this event, particularly within Spain, where the relatively small festival has a reputation well beyond its size. Lorca, comparing the two, wrote that the Toro de la Vega “brings out primitive instincts with its pursuit of a defenceless being that is fleeing, terrified, from a horde armed with sharpened lances; the Toro de la Vega smells of animalism, of the thrill of the chase, of abuse… It is a mark of identity for a town that has a right to its tradition, but in doing so, is sent back to the Stone Age.” He drums his point home in mentioning a tweet that distinguishes the two as strikingly as the Tomatina festival and gastronomy.
Part of a rising tide of criticism, the Spanish government heeded calls to ban the festival, doing so in 2016. Banned by the regional government, who outlawed the killing of the bull as a part of the festival, Tordesillas’ local council appealed it, citing the ban as unconstitutional and an assault on their culture. In 2019, the Spanish Supreme Court upheld it in a move many hope will be a precursor to a nationwide ban on all events where bulls are killed, not only such festivals as the Toro de la Vega.
Thought of as a historic step, it isn’t without a former exemplar. Under the reign of Francisco Franco, the infamous event also had a momentary blockage. Franco’s disliking of it was clear. In 1964, he sent the Civil Guard to the town in an attempt to stop it. Unsuccessful, the champion lancers were subsequently apprehended and beaten. Two years later, the fate of the event was set. According to the Ministry of the Interior, it would cease entirely citing, “unnecessary suffering for the animals, detract from our cultural level and offer a pretext for organizing discredit campaigns against Spain.” Regularly mischaracterized as a violent vestige of the Franco regime, history, as happens painfully often, is warped to fit the contemporary narrative.
Franco’s brand of nationalism relied on a unified nationalistic vision, an ideological solidarity he felt could be compromised by activists protesting this event. Succumbing to pressure, the ban was overturned in 1970 where the festival occured, unhindered, up to 2016. In what could be the twilight days of Spain’s bullfighting history, the banning of this event also provides a platform for the ancient art to differentiate itself, to bring people onboard who had previously harboured strong resentment against bull related customs like Tordesillas.
Guy Hedgecoe wrote for Politico about his experience at the festival and noted a rather peculiar contradiction. Widely derided as barbaric, a claim difficult to defend, the journalist spoke to a participant firsthand about his thoughts. In talking to one of the men, who said that the spearing — now-outlawed — is carried out efficiently and that it’s not as cruel as people would have you believe, Hedgecoe noticed something on the man, “a bull’s silhouette and the word “Respect” tattooed on the back of his close-shaven head.” Even in these events, as far removed as they are from the traditional corrida, there is the romanticism of man versus beast.
In the legislation and prohibition of the bullfighting world, contemporary politicians have latched onto this cause under the pretext of institutional encroachment on traditional Spanish identity. Building on the anti-establishment narrative of many of Europe’s right-wing parties, Vox have ridden the wave of identitarian politics, with bullfighting becoming one of its unsuspected cornerstones.
Where Franco worried that the perception of Spain, both internally and externally would suffer, politics in Spain are now being played out on a different battlefield, less concerned with how it makes Spain look, focussing instead on how it makes them feel — ideally by rousing patriotic and nationalistic sentiment. As Spain ushered in the era of democracy, after Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975, and embraced new metropolitan lives, leaving behind their largely rural identity, many traditions have fallen by the wayside. For Santiago Abascal and his Vox party, bullfighting is too sacred, its fracture from Spanish identity the final blow of globalisation and life in the European Union.
In 2013, the then conservative government deemed bullfighting as “cultural heritage worthy of protection.” A contentious law protects it, one that many vowed to overturn, but that has remained in place due to Spain’s stagnant political system in the subsequent years. The foundation of the law was built upon how “Bullfighting is an artistic manifestation detached from ideologies in which deep human values such as intelligence, bravery, aesthetics or solidarity are highlighted,” the official legal text read.
Catalonia and the Canary Islands have dug their heels in, upholding bans since 2012 and 1991 respectively with the Balearic Islands banning sharp instruments in a bullring — rather than bullfighting itself — effectively subverting the traditional bullfighting structure. Despite Catalonia’s ban, their failure to include other bull-related events in the bill came under fire from animal rights groups and Castillan Spanish who see bullfighting’s exclusion as a political act aimed at removing ‘traditional Spanish culture’ from Catalonia’s regional identity.
Further compounding this line of thought becomes apparent in an analysis of the voting patterns. Catalonia’s pro-independence parties overwhelmingly voted for the ban, whilst socialist and conservative parties both voted against it. Later deemed unconstitutional, the ban was also annulled in 2016.
Animal rights groups are most often portrayed as the protagonist in bullfighting’s demise. However, this role has been wrongly cast. It’s not about crusading activists and an online community railing against a perceived fault. No, the reality is much more mundane. As with almost every other cultural outlet in Spain, including theatre, ballet and museums, bullfighting suffered deeply from the 2008 economic crash, causing a widespread shift in behavioural consumption.
People are talking with their wallets and the arena of culture has seceded from old bastions like museums to contemporary platforms like Netflix. Nowhere else in Europe — besides Italy — is the culture war more pronounced. Duncan Wheeler, professor of Spanish Studies at Leeds University noted that bullfighting is just one of many cultural arenas suffering in Spain’s fast-moving society, stating that, “Audiences for cultural events are down across the board; theatre admissions, for example, were down a third [in Spain] between 2008 and 2013, and that’s not the worst affected sector.”
Agents in power who take issue with bullfighting initially did so socially, but have adapted to the more immediate methodology of the distribution of public funding. The dwindling number of events is less a reflection of social change as it is economic, with many city councils slashing subsidies for bullfighting events, schools and other associated costs incurred. A response of bullfighting promoters has been to increase ticket costs, further isolating much of their audience.
Spain’s choice to cut funding may be short-sighted though. Besides historical and cultural implications, the potential financial losses the country might experience are vast. Estimates sit around the €3.5 billion per annum mark, according to Deutsche Welle, a huge figure if projections are to be believed and calculated in part on the 2015 figure of 6.1 million tickets sold, plus the 250,000 employed as a result of bullfighting.
Even outside of Spain, the battle on funding rages. Farmers receive subsidies in Spain, including those who rear bulls for fighting, under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. Officially, the European Union does not subsidise bullfighting, as is claimed. However, that’s not to say no EU money reaches it. As CAP payments are given for eligible hectares of land, not on its uses, there is nothing to stop it making its way towards bullfighting. Although, in 2012, there was a challenge from a Danish MEP as to whether — if the money made it to bullfighting — it would be going against the EU’s policy on animal welfare laws — a point still without any resolution.
Claiming the EU directly subsidises bullfighting was found to be disingenuous, a tactical sleight-of-hand that has provoked counter-challenges from a section of the Spanish public who mightn’t usually have felt galvanised to interact. Such occurrences — where uninterested members of the Spanish population felt forced to speak — aren’t uncommon and are, arguably, one of the major roadblocks for the anti-bullfighting movement.
Both the agricultural and bullfighting lobby hold great weight, clashing horns with the anti-bullfighting activists in a battle of enmeshed power versus a contemporary cause with amplified social influence. Or more plainly put — Rural versus urban. Old versus young. From the outside, it’s very difficult to see any middle ground.
This issue of anti-bullfighting activists pushing too hard became particularly clear in the aftermath of the death of aforementioned matador Víctor Barrio whose public grieving seemed heavily outweighed by those exclaiming that justice had been served and that nature prevailed. Social media remains the realm of activists who are of a much younger demographic.
Barrio was the first matador to be slain since 1985, making his death a lightning rod for the sentiments surrounding bullfighting. On one hand, it reinforces the argument that there is grave danger for the matador, on the other, it was a perfect revenge story for animal right’s activists to gloat.
During the event in Teruel, Spain, the matador was gored in the leg and chest, severing his aorta. He lay there momentarily, before being carried out, with a face contorted in pain as his immense bloodloss overcame the shock. Responses to his death were as impassioned as they were varied. One read “Yes, the death of bullfighters like Victor Barrio makes me happy. He had no pity for the bulls that he killed and I feel no pity for his death.” Another was similarly scornful, “A bullfighter has died. One less torturer, and today the planet is a little more clean of all this sh–,” said Pablo Hasél, a socially-conscious left-wing rapper.
Yet, these weren’t the ones that stuck. It was a fairly innocuous — considering the vulgarity of some of the comments — tweet from a teacher in Valencia that caught the media’s attention. Vicent Belenguer Santos posted on his Facebook, “We will dance on your grave and piss on the wreaths that they place for you!” Immediately a petition arose online, scapegoating the teacher for most of the hate, amassing 219,000 signatures on change.org within the first two days, demanding his resignation. It was a reminder that polite society would only tolerate protest up to a point.
Unsurprisingly, such brutality of words made many jump to the defence of Barrio, particularly it seemed, considering his young wife, Raquel Sanz, had watched it unfold from her ringside seat. As per bullfighting tradition, the mother of a bull who has killed must be slain as to end the bloodline. The mother bull, Lorenza, became the star of her own social media campaign created to protect her. Another petition, this one to spare her life, was started, collecting only 5,000 signatures. Led to believe attitude’s had changed, this cast a stark shadow over those hopeful for bullfighting’s abolition.
Tempered by each sporadic recurrence of bullfighting in the media’s spotlight, its fluid social and political status is often capitalised on as a pawn to further both leftwing and rightwing political agendas. Early in 2019, Spain’s Vox party entered a coalition with Partido Popular in the country’s regional elections. In return for their support, Vox asked to commit to lowering taxes, combatting illegal immigration, tackling Islamic fundamentalism, but more surprisingly, was the support for bullfighting.
Parties on the left have been working with animal rights groups in an effort to ban it altogether. This move was as much about bullfighting as it was a political powerplay. In bullfighting’s strong symbolic value to Spain, contemporary parties can situate themselves on the traditional-progressive spectrum depending on how they treat this issue. Although without colour historically, in contemporary Spanish politics, bullfighting has become symbolic of rightwing values.
Hardship abound, one might wonder why — in today’s current climate — a child would hope to become a matador. Unless they become a big name, like José Tomas or Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, it’s difficult to imagine their goal being finance. The draw is something more spiritual, in the same way that a man may be drawn to priesthood in the hope of finding a connection rendered impossible during a time otherwise profane.
Referred to as saviour’s, precocious talents in Spain’s myriad schools for bullfighting are entering this world as it is declining, practising the execution of ever more daring passes to stand out amongst their peers. These children, coming-of-age in a dangerous game, are the source of great fascination in Spanish society, often being the heroes of the small towns from which they hail, the reverence of its inhabitants towards the young talent taking on a religious fervour.
Spain, a deeply Catholic country, is imbued with biblical mythology, these contemporary dynamics clearly revealing the country’s subconscious roots in Christianty, with the families playing out the dynamic between God and Jesus Christ through the notion of sacrifice. According to Dr. Allen Josephs, professor of literature and Spanish studies at the University of Western Florida, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son… that’s what this Spanish family is doing. They’re nurturing the sacrifice of their son.”
Playing out, of course, subliminally, this narrative holds great weight in the deeply religious country of Spain. Whilst the Spanish hold bullfighters displaying great technical adeptness in particularly high regards — not every torero has such mastery. Some bullfighters, like boxers or philosophers (a bullfighter, I find, falls in between the two) do so with guile and grace, but others with brute force and bravery.
Bullfighting has been defended here as art, but there are those practitioners who aren’t deemed artists, but are equally as capable of staring down death. With matadors like these, does corrida become harder to defend or, perversely, easier?
Mexico has consistently produced some of the greatest boxers throughout history. It’s not surprising that Antonio Barrera, the most gored bullfighter in history, found his home there, in a country where bravery, machismo and valiente men thrive. Where having cojones is of greater value than skill, artistry and precision when in the practice of articulate violence. Where boxing is hand-to-hand — mano a mano — the corrida is hand-to-sword. Finishing with a death sentence.
Many Spanish critics turned their noses up at Barrera’s lack of artistery, viewing him as a sort of journeyman matador. The Mexican perspective is ideologically consistent to the Spanish viewpoint on bullfighting, that it is art, not sport. Bullfighter’s like Barrera counterintuitively strengthen this point of the spirituality behind it, where a man risks his life to feel close to death. Barrera isn’t a benchmark for grace of movement, but he does epitomise the traits of the bull as embodied by a human. As a matador, Barrera and those in his mould are as important in understanding the matador and the bull as those considered ‘greats’.
These traits — virility, strength and power — have become symbolic in other realms too. Although Italian, Lamborghini supercars feature a ferocious bull on their logo — testament to the fascination founder Ferruccio Lamborghini had with bulls, in particular those bred by, or relating to Don Eduardo Miura’s infamous Miura breed (after which Lamborghini named a model). The Italian automobile designer was particularly fond of the characteristics of the bulls in the fight, more so than the matador, naming many cars after individual bulls, specifically those who displayed great courage.
Lamborghini named the Islero after the bull that killed famous bullfighter Manolete aged only 30, in 1947. Manolete was famed for his sober approach, barely moving as the bulls passed by him, linking consecutive passes in a pioneering style, more to do with displaying gallantry than playing up to the crowd. Islero has poor eyesight, but a temperate disposition. Despite the bull’s manager informing Manolete of its propensity to kill, the bullfighter refused to end his show quickly and succumbed to a fatal goring.
In the Lamborghini oeuvre, few cars are more revered than the Murciélago. The car’s aggressive shape perhaps best encapsulates the taurine posture of all the maker’s models. It’s fitting as the Murciélago is based on the myth of the bull who just would not perish. Rafael Molina Sánchez, best known as Lagartijo (lizard), struck the bull a reputed 28 times with the sword. Unable to kill it, the crowd pleaded for its mercy and to this, the torero agreed.
Bullfighting folklore has it that Murciélagol was bred into the Miura line. Of this breed, Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, “There are certain strains of bull with a marked ability to learn from what goes on in the arena … faster than the actual fight progresses which makes it more difficult from one minute to the next to control them … these bulls are raised by Don Eduardo Miura’s sons from old fighting stock…” Barrera, the heavily gored matador, has that same spirit as Murciélago — the yin to Spanish bullfighting’s typical yang — a bull in amongst bulls, a matador of utmost importance in understanding the reality of toreo.
Final Tercio — Dying Thoughts
Ross and I attended this event in 2016, although it feels like a lifetime ago already. We are not brothers, bound by blood, but connected by ephemeral moments we recall fondly as memories, memories such as these. That memories are more fleeting than blood doesn’t weaken the bond, but strengthens it. Things not designed to last gain weight through the will of their own merit. The bullfight, Madrid’s inexorable heat, our impassioned discussions and telepathic moments since have this event as its talisman. Its impact on us cannot be underestimated. Our thoughts over time crystallizing.
Torture is torture. There might be a scale of sadism whereby a slow-drawn out torture would be deemed worse than a momentary flash, but at that point, we’re splitting hairs. I’ve had a great many arguments with people from Spain, from Madrid precisely, and many other countries too. I am not here to deride nor defend it, but as I stated in the introduction, to strike at the heart of hypocrisy.
I watched a group of Spanish girls eating low-quality supermarket meat in a hostel I stayed in, berating me on the cruelty these bulls must endure as our conversation turned taurine over a few beers. The lack of ideological consistency when dealing with such contentious topics is at best, damaging to progress, at worst, quite disturbing.
As Fiske-Harrison wrote of the fighting bull’s life, “In terms of animal welfare, the fighting bull lives four to six years whereas the meat cow lives one to two. What is more, it doesn’t just live in the sense of existing, it lives a full and natural life. Those years are spent free, roaming in the dehesa, the lightly wooded natural pastureland which is the residue of the ancient forests of Spain.”
The animals that go to slaughter for food have no choice. Nor do they experience respect, gratitude or glory in their relatively short lives. They live as nothing and die as little more than a quick bite before a night out, half of which ends up in the bin. In another piece, Fiske-Harrison accepts this dichotomy as a part of the artform’s transgressive allure, “it is too easy to mock this hypocrisy. Bullfighting is most interesting because it does live on a borderline between right and wrong.”
A starker comparison is difficult to find. Despite it not being justification unto itself, it provides a framework for a dialogue free of hypocrisy from an animal welfare perspective. There’s more to it though. If bullfighting should die, so too would the bravo bull, the closest link to the European wild bull, an animal far closer to nature than the comatose and eerily weak inhabitants of Europe’s abattoirs. We wouldn’t only be severing a link to human tradition, but a physical creature of our past, unhindered by human genetic engineering.
With bullfighting, in particular, people seek out information and media to conform to their beliefs, to strengthen how they feel, not to challenge them. Changing our worldview is a painful process, particularly towards something so widely derided as reprehensible. One particular example stands out from my research into the subject that embodies the hysteria and anger surrounding it.
Last year, the debate once again came to the fore in Spanish discourse, even breaching its borders into a worldwide context, when renowned matador Morante de la Puebla who, during a performance, pulled out a handkerchief and gracefully wiped the face of the bull, shortly before killing the animal. Speculation roared.
Both sides of the debate took from it exactly what they wanted. The pro-bullfighting crowd interpreted it as elevating the artform, adding tragedy to the performance. Others on the same side that he was wiping sweat from its brow, to avoid it dripping into the bull’s eye and causing discomfort and confusion as the crescendo approached. The other camp wasn’t so understanding.
Many thought Morante a sadistic ‘psychopath’. Silvia Barquero, president of Spain’s Animalist Party Against Mistreatment of Animals political party fumed, “Only a twisted and perverse mind would be capable of torturing an animal until the blood runs down its legs before wiping moisture off its head.” Again, it was Lorca who took a neutrally informative stance revealing the truth behind the gesture.
In reference to Joselito el Gallo, a matador who was killed performing in 1920, Lorca wrote, “Neither tears nor sweat. All Morante was doing… was giving a tip of the hat to his idol, in a tribute to a classic way of bullfighting, a detail from another era, an acknowledgement of the greatest bullfighter in history.” Joselito often presented a similar gesture, used as an idiosyncrasy in his own performance.
Morante caught particular ire for his endorsement of the Vox party and friendship with Santiago Abascal, for which he has seen his house vandalised, daubed with phrases comparing him to a Nazi. Inflamed by contemporary circumstance, objectivity was thrown away on both sides.
Aficionados view the whole ritual, event and arena as Holy, that violence is a spiritual act where man and beast can both transcend body and form. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Bullfighting’s place in Spanish culture has never been consolidated throughout the country’s shifting socio-cultural spheres. There was a time, in the late 19th century, when a group (the Generation of ’98) fought against bullfighting and flamenco music’s popularity, deeming both ‘non-European’ assets of Spanish culture.
Then, in the 1980s, many progressives began to view bullfighting as a transgressive part of culture, a rebellious fading star that students and activists could nail their colours to. Now, in our latest epoch, it’s a pastime of the elites, a right-winger’s violent fantasy fulfilled on Sunday afternoons. These opinions have morphed, yet bullfighting has stood its ground. Will it continue to hold fast? It’s difficult to say.
My personal thoughts are thus. It’s one thing to watch poorly shot images online, another to read about it, but something entirely different to experience the collective emotions live. What kind of person wouldn’t be seduced by such heightened melodrama in a cultural moment so deprived of it?
Having boxed in a ring, in front of a crowd, and climbed and abseiled mountains at hundreds of feet from the ground, I can attest to the visceral desire to acquaint oneself with death and danger. We’re numb to the world through our bombardment of news about murders, plagues and disease. Entirely disconnected from what any of these things mean, actually finding yourself within touching distance is strangely comforting — a warm embrace where more than being alive, you feel alive.
Bullfighting’s ability to make one feel, as with other dying forms of art like theatre, ballet and opera, could be its salvation. It’s violence and archaic pageantry could likewise be the corrida’s death. Less about the event, bullfighting’s future seems to reside in the way we see ourselves and what we value — something rooted in high mythology capable of provoking great emotion or a cruel spectacle that has no place in a modern liberal democracy.
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