NO BULL

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” Ernest Hemingway

Poster for the last bullfight in Barcelona

We still have the mountain climbing, if you drive a couple of hours, and the Grand Prix, albeit now every two years, alternating with Valencia, but there will be no more bullfighting in Barcelona.

Bull fighting ceased in Catalunya at the end of the 2011 season, banned by the Catalan parliament, ostensibly on anti-cruelty grounds, but many people think that the political imperative was really about making a symbolic cultural break with the rest of Spain. 

You can still watch bullfighting from Madrid and Seville on television, but on the rare occasions that I happen across it, the bull always seems to be winning. 

 

Bull fighting was never really that big in Barcelona, though the city did at one time have two sizeable functioning Plaza de Toros. 

There was little mourning over the passing of the sport, even families with long associations with the spectacle, interviewed after the blood and dust from  the final catalan corrida was being swept away said it was an activity that had had its time. 

  

But what will now become of the magnificent Monumental Plaza de Toros?

Arenas shopping centre

I hope that it does not go the same way as Las Arenas Plaza de Toros and  become another shopping centre.

It would make a great music and theatre venue though. 

Is there the market I wonder? A brash over the top Carmen in the Monumental Barcelona would certainly have more appeal than he prospect of another dreary Aida in Verona.