I Went To A Bullfight In Málaga And Left With More Questions Than I Arrived With

The woman to my left is wearing a mantilla and has the posture of someone who was born sitting in a cathedral. The man to my right has a cigar and an almost intimidating confidence. The crowd filling the Plaza de Toros La Malagueta on the third night of the Feria de Málaga is dressed as if it is another day at Wimbledon, just with fans instead of Pim’s in their hands. I have seen more hooligans at a Watford home game than I am seeing here at what is supposed to be Spain’s most barbaric tradition. What is going on?

I should tell you that several of my friends, when I mentioned I was going to a bullfight, didn’t react in horror as I anticipated. They imagined something between a rodeo and a circus, dangerous but essentially non-lethal, high on bravado and low on consequence. Nobody had told them about the blood. Six bulls per night, every night of the Feria, dispatched with varying degrees of ceremony and skill in front of a crowd that knows the difference between a good fight and a poor one and is not shy about communicating its verdict. Six bulls is, for the mathematically curious, enough beef to supply the entire arena with Big Macs.

I am an animal lover. I am also a person who had jamón for breakfast, jamón for lunch, and was planning jamón for dinner. When in Spain! I had assumed these two facts about myself could coexist indefinitely without creating a philosophical crisis. The Plaza de Toros La Malagueta is not a place where comfortable contradictions survive the evening.

I want to be clear that I am not here to tell you what to think about bullfighting. I am a visitor in a country that has been sophisticated, warm, and generous to me in every conceivable way, and it is not my place to arrive at someone else’s centuries-old tradition and immediately start issuing verdicts. But where does one draw the line between tourism and tradition? And is bullfighting still thriving, and we choose not to talk about it, because boycotting would mean no more Benidorm summers?