TORDESILLAS, Spain — The town of Tordesillas has held its annual festival, known as Toro de la Vega, on the second or third Tuesday of September since medieval times. A bull is set loose and runs across the bridge into nearby fields, where locals on horseback spear the animal to death with lances.
Traditionally, Toro de la Vega is a day of celebration. Locals fill the town’s bars in the morning before lining the streets in anticipation of the bull chase as traditional music blasts out over loudspeakers.
But this year was different. Hundreds of townspeople gathered on the southern edge of the town to demonstrate against a new law approved by the regional government of Castilla y León in May, which outlaws the spearing or harming of the bull.
Tattooed young men stood shoulder-to-shoulder with middle-aged housewives and frail pensioners to march across the medieval bridge, chanting “Tordesillas no se rinde” — “Tordesillas doesn’t surrender” — and waving banners protesting the interference of politicians and animal rights campaigners in their local festival.
The backlash against this animal-friendly law reflects a division between the so-called “new Left” and more tradition-minded voters and politicians.
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Tordesillas is not the only Spanish town to host festivities in which animals are either killed or harmed. From pulling off the heads of geese in Carpio de Tajo to setting fire to bulls’ horns in Medinaceli, dozens of festivals are based on violent traditions that are increasingly unpalatable to a modern audience.
A poll published earlier this year — before the new law came into effect —showed that only 5 percent of Spaniards supported the fiesta.
Among them, Toro de la Vega has become perhaps the most controversial. The festival’s drama and gore has made Tordesillas a focal point for Spain’s animal rights debate. Large groups of campaigners have traveled to the town to protest the festival for years, sometimes coming to blows with locals.
The battle has now been won. The new law was a response to the increasingly uncontrollable scenes that Tordesillas was host to each September and the negative publicity that the bull’s spearing attracted. Only a small group of activists made the trek this year and were carefully separated from those taking part in the fiesta by a police cordon.
The sound of fireworks announced the bull’s release onto the streets. As it galloped over the bridge, a group of men on horseback awaited its arrival on the other side, as custom dictates. Despite online rumors that a handful of die-hards planned to defy the new law and spear the bull, the men pursued it, then guided it unharmed back to the town, where it was slaughtered out of sight. It was the first time in centuries — apart from a brief hiatus in the 1960s — that the Tordesillas bull had not been lanced to death.
The locals I spoke to just before this year’s fiesta — renamed Toro de la Peña — were angry, not just with the politicians who had ended their bull-spearing tradition, but with the media for portraying them as bloodthirsty rednecks.
“It’s not as cruel as people think,” said one bystander, a bull’s silhouette and the word “Respect” tattooed on the back of his close-shaven head. The now-outlawed spearing, he insisted, had always been done swiftly and efficiently.
Still, he, like many others, admitted to having resigned to the fact that the ban represented the shape of things to come.
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A poll published earlier this year — before the new law came into effect —showed that only 5 percent of Spaniards supported the fiesta. Meanwhile, only 19 percent supported organized bullfights, down 10 points from just three years earlier. A large demonstration in Madrid against bullfighting and other animal-baiting festivities in early September is evidence of a growing awareness of animal rights.
A bull runs past horsemen during the “Toro de la Pena” festival | Cesar Manso/AFP via Getty Images
As is so often the case in Spain, both sides of the debate are deeply, often bitterly, entrenched.
In July, matador Víctor Barrio was gored to death by a bull in the town of Teruel. It was the first death of a professional bullfighter in the ring in years, and it triggered an enormous outpouring of grief from colleagues and fans.
But for some bullfighting opponents it was a rare case of justice served. Many voiced their glee on social networks. “When a bull is killed, it’s culture and art, but when a bullfighter dies it’s a tragedy?” tweeted one. “Today is a happy day for humanity,” said another Twitter user, addressing the deceased bullfighter. “We’ll dance on your grave.”
Social media has had an outsized role in the debate against Spain’s fiestas. Videos of animals being harmed have become a powerful weapon for abolitionists and footage of a calf being taunted to death in front of a jubilant audience in the town of Valmojado this summer went viral, shocking many Spaniards.
The world-famous San Fermín bull fighting festival in Pamplona, which has been marred by a string of sexual assaults on visitors, has also become a target for activists.
But if animal rights campaigners have plunged a knife into the heart of Spain’s bullfighting and animal-baiting town fiestas, the country’s new political landscape has twisted it deeper.
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After decades during which the two dominant parties — the conservative Popular Party (PP) and the Socialists (PSOE) — either staunchly defended the pastime or tiptoed around the issue, Spain’s new Left has dragged bullfighting into the political arena. Podemos, formed in 2014 and now Spain’s third political party, calls for fiestas like Toro de la Peña to be abolished and has urged towns to stage referenda on banning bullfights.
Podemos appeals to a predominantly young, urban and digitally savvy voter, the kind that isn’t likely to attend bullfights or travel to Toro de la Peña. By contrast, many of the electoral strongholds of the PP and PSOE are rural, with an older demographic and a deeper connection to the tradition.
Bullfighting is commonly associated with provincialism, conservatism and tradition for tradition’s sake — concepts that are anathema to Podemos and others on the new Left, which now governs or co-governs Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and many other towns and cities.
Many in the business insist that associating los toros with a particular party or political leaning is absurd. Serafín Marín, a matador, told me that he has friends “who are more obsessed with bullfighting than me and they’re on the hard Left.”
Despite the siege mentality of the bullfighting world, a few critical voices from within question the quality of the spectacle being offered.
Indeed, political positions on the issue are not clear cut. Podemos has watered down its stance on animal rights since 2014. And it was a PP administration that first introduced the ban on bull-spearing during Toro de la Peña (although the decision was not considered ideological, but rather intended to end violent clashes at the festival).
Still, it was the right-wing PP who, in 2013, approved a law enshrining bullfighting as a “historical-cultural national heritage,” and the pastime’s most celebrated cheerleader is the deeply conservative Peruvian-Spanish novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who is close to many PP politicians. “I’ve always defended bullfighting because there’s an attack on it with orchestrated campaigns which in many cases are due to political motives,” he has said.
So far, that “attack” is still very much a work in progress.
In 2010, Catalonia banned bullfighting, after a civic petition received backing from the regional parliament. The pro-independence Catalan Republican Left (ERC) was the only main party to support the ban unanimously (most Socialists and all PP deputies opposed it). The measure, critics argued, had more to do with Catalan nationalism than animal rights.
In the Basque city of San Sebastián, meanwhile, bullfighting was banned by the leftist pro-independence Bildu between 2013 and 2015, when the coalition was voted out of office.
A man with blood on his hand holds a lance during the festival | Cesar Manso/AFP via Getty Images
Podemos and the new Left have organized referenda in many towns across Spain. Several, including Xátiva and Aldaia, on the east coast, voted for a bullfighting ban. Meanwhile, the withdrawal of public subsidies for town bullfights by leftist administrations has had the equivalent effect in many areas. Interestingly, San Sebastián, now governed by traditional parties, is planning its own referendum for next year, which could see the ban that ended in 2015 reintroduced.
But beyond these politically driven developments, it’s impossible to ignore the damage bullfighting has inflicted on itself.
The economic crisis of 2008-2013 seriously hurt the industry, as subsidies dried up and middle-class fans were driven away by ticket prices that refused to drop. While 3,650 bullfights took place in 2007, according to the Spanish government, by 2014 there were fewer than 1,900.
Despite the siege mentality of the bullfighting world, a few critical voices from within question the quality of the spectacle being offered. “In general, bullfights are a drag,” noted El País newspaper’s bullfighting correspondent, Antonio Lorca, “and as a result, the public is abandoning the bullrings.”
Lorca has pointed to a decline in the quality of bulls, which he claims are increasingly docile. He also bemoans the fact that Spain’s few first-rate bullfighters, such as José Tomás, are chasing big paychecks and overly selective about where and when they perform, while younger matadors struggle to break through in an industry controlled by a handful of powerful agents.
While the new, bloodless, Toro de la Peña festival seems to spell the beginning of the end for animal-based town festivities in Spain, bullfighting is likely to suffer a far slower, more painful death.
Guy Hedgecoe is a Madrid-based journalist and author of “Freezing Franco: The Battle for Spain’s Memory” (2015).