Perceptions of bulls are often culturally circumscribed. North Americans, some say, are too urbanized, suburbanized, and alienated from the ancient association of the bull with the divine to appreciate the animal’s many virtues, which is why, in English, semantic associations involving bulls tend to be negative, signifying only the brutish and the coarse. Spanish and Latin American cultures, on the other hand, still revere the animal for his grace, agility, and controlled strength.

As ganaderos (bull breeders) like to say, “Bulls get their size and build from their fathers, but their hearts come from their mothers.” The bulls used in corridas are invariably of pedigreed lineage raised on special ranches (ganaderías), the most celebrated being those of Miura, from Sevilla, which have killed more famous matadors, including the great Manolete, than any others. Shortly after weaning, vaccinating, and branding, the yearling males are tested in the open fields, and only those displaying the proper ferocity are retained for future corridas. Some of remarkable pedigree and fine physical construction are separated and later put through a series of tests—by mounted men, never by bullfighters on foot with capes—designed to prove the animal’s bravery. If acceptable, such bulls are then used exclusively for the arena; if not, they are sent to the slaughterhouse. At two to three years the heifers are tested in a small ring at the ranch through all phases of the corrida, and only those deemed acceptable are kept for breeding; those rejected are also sent to the slaughterhouse. Royalty used to attend these tests (tientas), which often became social events. During a tienta a ranch may test scores of animals over the course of several days, during which novice or retired bullfighters might perform with young breeding cows, star matadors might practice new maneuvers, and amateur matadors and members of the literati might test their courage in the ring, usually with heifers. Many matadors have been seriously wounded by heifers that were little more than calves. The great Antonio Bienvenida, for example, was killed by a small heifer on his ranch in 1975.

Bulls are never used a second time in the corrida. This is because their memory is remarkable, and former experience would make subsequent fights too dangerous for the matadors to execute their graceful capework, which is the main reason fans come to the arena.

All cattle are colour-blind. The colour red has been adopted for the muleta (the small cape used in the bullfight’s final act) since it minimizes the appearance of blood and other stains and produces a more colourful spectacle; the front of the large work cape (or capote, used in the first act of the bullfight) is magenta and the inside yellow or blue, and the bulls charge either colour just as readily as they do the red muleta. (It is motion that provokes the bull’s charge.) Like racehorses, all fighting bulls are named, generally taking the name of their mother; e.g., the mother of Islero (the bull that killed Manolete) was Islera.

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There were some 600 bullrings in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century, from those in Madrid and Barcelona, seating about 20,000 spectators each, to those in small towns accommodating mere hundreds. The size of the arena floor never varies more than a few yards, those at higher altitudes being smaller than those at sea level to help compensate for altitude fatigue. The Plaza México in Mexico City seats approximately 55,000 spectators and is the largest bullring in the world; the 18th-century Plaza de Acho in Lima, Peru, is one of the oldest arenas; and Sevilla’s Real Maestranza and Madrid’s Plaza Monumental, known as Las Ventas, are the two most prestigious rings for bullfighters to perform in. Spain’s oldest bullring (c. 1785) is the Neoclassical stone arena in Ronda and is still used. Many of the accoutrements commonly associated with contemporary sporting events—food vendors, program sellers, and billboard advertisements—can be found at the corrida, and some bullrings also house bullfighting museums.

Performers

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Professional bullfighters, called toreros (they are famously called toreadors in Bizet’s opera Carmen, a word that harkens back to the days of mounted bullfighters), consist of the picadors, the mounted assistants with pike poles who lance the bull in the bullfight’s first act; the banderilleros, the assistants on foot who execute the initial capework and place the barbed darts (banderillas) into the bull in the second act; and of course the matadors, who work the bull and eventually kill it in the bullfight’s final act. Six bulls are usually killed during each corrida; three matadors, whose cuadrillas (team of assistants) consist of two or three banderilleros and two picadors, alternate in the performance according to seniority in the profession (the most senior matador taking the first and the fourth bull).

Bullfighters must pass through a trying novitiate as novilleros (novices)—training first as becerristas (fighting two-year-old animals), then as novilleros sin picadores (fighting two- and three-year-old bulls without picadors), and finally as novilleros with picadors—before receiving the alternativa, the ceremony in which the senior matador confers on the novice professional status and acceptance as a professional equal, capable of dispatching any bull properly. These rules apply equally to the distaff side; female bullfighters (called matadoras or toreras, though some of them resent being called by the feminine form of the noun and would prefer to be called, like male bullfighters, toreros or matadors) have been around since antiquity, though very few have performed with distinction for very long. Should a bull prove cowardly or damaged or should a matador in a mano-a-mano match be gored or incapacitated, substitute bulls and matadors (both are called sobresalientes) are at the ready. Prior to 1974 in Spain, when female bullfighters were not allowed to dismount and kill the bull on foot, a sobresaliente would be called in at the end of the fight to finish off the bull, much to the disappointment and disgust of many toreras such as Conchita Cintrón, who long sought the same opportunities afforded her male counterparts.

Female bullfighters have long generated comment. Some toreros and bullfighting aficionados have never accepted them, seeing them as mere novelties at best or as trespassers on a sacred male domain at worst; from this perspective, the women should stick to their traditional role in the corrida, that of “beautiful spectator.” In fact, some critics of bullfighting hold toreras in special disdain. Some say the young attractive bullfighters, such as Cristina Sánchez, who in 1996 became the first woman to have taken her alternativa in Europe and who made her debut as a full matador in Spain, are responsible for breathing new life into a supposedly moribund institution. However, others have long welcomed matadoras and judged them accordingly on their merits as bullfighters.

What motivates many young bullfighters, whether male or female, to pick up the cape is the same vision of fame and fortune that motivates budding athletes the world over. And for the lucky few who make it, great wealth and adulation await them. Babe Ruth was often called the highest-paid athlete of his day, but, as Adrian Shubert points out in Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (1999), his salary paled in comparison to what Spanish bullfighters were then earning. One multiple-fight performance in Lima in the 1920s earned a star matador as much as Ruth made in an entire year.

Like any other commercialized venture generating great wealth and prestige, bullfighting has had its share of scandal. Bribes and payoffs for this favour or that—among bullfighters, breeders, promoters, agents, and critics—as well as horn-shaving scandals (shortened horns can give an advantage to the matador), indiscriminate breeding (thus weakening certain stocks), the drugging of bulls, and the gorging of bulls on grain (thus giving them weight but assuring their weakness in strength and stamina) are among the kinds of malfeasance that have shadowed bullfighting’s long history. Exploding banderillas (the barbed darts placed in the animal’s withers during the second act of the corrida) were once routinely used to spark ferocity in bulls, but these were, not surprisingly, the target of much outrage by bullfighting critics as well as aficionados concerned about cruelty to animals and thus are no longer employed.