[LINK] "In a Spanish Region, a Twilight of the Matadors"
Michael Kimmerman's New York Times article highlights yet another way in which Catalonia, at least its nationalists, is separating itself from Spain and Spanish cultural norms as it moves towards something like nationhood.
Here in Catalonia, this persistently separatist-minded region of Spain, bullfighting has been in trouble for ages. And the economy hasn’t helped. Ticket prices are akin to opera’s. Fights are expensive to produce. The number of bullfights plummeted across Spain this year.
But José Tomás still draws enormous crowds. For aficionados, he is the last best hope for toreo, as bullfighting is called. Reclusive, a matador of unearthly fearlessness and calm, steeped in history and mystery, he retired in 2002, at 27 and the height of his fame, only to return unexpectedly five years later in Barcelona for what turned out to be the first sellout in 20 years at the 19,000-seat Plaza Monumental, this city’s beautiful old brick-and-tile bullring.
Sunday he was back, for another special occasion: perhaps the last bullfight ever in Catalonia.
Over the last three decades or so, dwindling interest among young Catalans has combined with pressure from animal-rights advocates and from Catalan nationalists to cripple toreo in Catalonia. Across the region’s four provinces, bullrings have closed; Barcelona’s is the only one still active.
Now a referendum before the Catalan Parliament would end bullfighting here altogether. There has long been talk in this part of Spain about a total prohibition on toreo. Fans have played it down. But this time, even aficionados think a ban is likely to pass.
[. . .]
That the issue remains, above all, political is demonstrated over the border, in the Catalan region of southern France, where bullfighting is embraced as fiercely as it is opposed in Spanish Catalonia, for exactly the same separatist reasons, in that case because it is banned in Paris.
“At a point when Europe is becoming bigger and more multicultural, Barcelona is becoming smaller and more Catalan,” is how Robert Elms, a British travel writer who has lived here, saw the situation. He had come to see José Tomás and remarked, before the corrida, how the dark but magical city he once knew has become a shiny, designer-label hub that nonetheless looks increasingly inward.
Here in Catalonia, this persistently separatist-minded region of Spain, bullfighting has been in trouble for ages. And the economy hasn’t helped. Ticket prices are akin to opera’s. Fights are expensive to produce. The number of bullfights plummeted across Spain this year.
But José Tomás still draws enormous crowds. For aficionados, he is the last best hope for toreo, as bullfighting is called. Reclusive, a matador of unearthly fearlessness and calm, steeped in history and mystery, he retired in 2002, at 27 and the height of his fame, only to return unexpectedly five years later in Barcelona for what turned out to be the first sellout in 20 years at the 19,000-seat Plaza Monumental, this city’s beautiful old brick-and-tile bullring.
Sunday he was back, for another special occasion: perhaps the last bullfight ever in Catalonia.
Over the last three decades or so, dwindling interest among young Catalans has combined with pressure from animal-rights advocates and from Catalan nationalists to cripple toreo in Catalonia. Across the region’s four provinces, bullrings have closed; Barcelona’s is the only one still active.
Now a referendum before the Catalan Parliament would end bullfighting here altogether. There has long been talk in this part of Spain about a total prohibition on toreo. Fans have played it down. But this time, even aficionados think a ban is likely to pass.
[. . .]
That the issue remains, above all, political is demonstrated over the border, in the Catalan region of southern France, where bullfighting is embraced as fiercely as it is opposed in Spanish Catalonia, for exactly the same separatist reasons, in that case because it is banned in Paris.
“At a point when Europe is becoming bigger and more multicultural, Barcelona is becoming smaller and more Catalan,” is how Robert Elms, a British travel writer who has lived here, saw the situation. He had come to see José Tomás and remarked, before the corrida, how the dark but magical city he once knew has become a shiny, designer-label hub that nonetheless looks increasingly inward.