The Lure of the Bullfight

When a bullfighter was gored to death in July, animal-rights activists and the British press cheered. But, says Henry Jeffreys, to understand Spain you have to experience the sublime artistry of the bullring.

- Henry Jeffreys

On Saturday 9th July in front of a live television audience a bullfighter, Victor Barrio, was gored to death by a bull named Lorenzo. The horn went through his chest and pierced his heart and lungs. Barrio is the first bullfighter to die in the ring since 1985, and his death was a global news story. Rather than sympathise for his widow, Raquel Sanz, British press comments were uniformly along the lines of ‘Isn’t it good to see the bull winning for a change?’

‘The British have a knee-jerk response to the very idea of bullfighting,’ Jason Webster told me. He is the author of a crime novel set in the world of bullfighting called Or the Bull Kills You. We weren’t always so squeamish. In the past American and British papers regularly carried articles about bullfighting. My daughter has a children’s book from the 1930s about a bull called Ferdinand who is a pacifist and just wants to smell the flowers. His fellow bulls, however, long to fight at Las Ventas in Madrid. There is no animal rights subtext.

When I was at school, the Spanish teacher would try to get us to have debates about the ethics of bullfighting, but I didn’t really have a view either way. This changed last summer when I was in Jerez as a guest of a sherry company for the annual feria (horse fair) there. They had a spare ticket to the Plaza de Toros, so on a whim I went.

I expected to be horrified, but at first I was just baffled. There were no matadors. The entire thing was conducted on horseback. I later learned that these mounted bullfighters are called