The Expat View of the Running of the Bulls

One of the services of my mobile phone is to send news items which, through clever algorithms, can decide that the owner of the device – me in this case – might be interested in viewing. Some of these make their way to Business over Tapas, since my phone is tuned, through a process somewhere between supply and demand... and outright spying on my viewing habits...  to Spanish news (plus a sprinkling of Brexit stuff, but that’s another story). One of the stories that came up on Monday was an item from The Olive Press telling me of the ‘Grisly fate of Pamplona bulls during Spain’s famous San Fermin festival’. Apparently, they end up in the bull ring where they are killed. Well, golly gee, who knew?

The EWN calls it ‘T

A clutch of anti-taurinos

he Festival of Cruelty’ in an editorial and wants the bull-running banned (the Pamplona burgers raking in 165 million euros during the festival in 2017 – here - would disagree). We foreigners know what is best for our Spanish friends, apparently. 

The British embassy was offering tips on how to enjoy the Pamplona festival on Facebook last week, and got shot down in flames by hundreds of irate expats here.

The Pamplona bullring is the fourth largest in the world, at 19,720 people. There were bullfights this year (here) for ten days. Bullfights are expensive – (El País claimed back in 2008 that a first class bullfight would cost the promoter around 90,000€) and of course no one would bankroll them if they lost money. According to Temas de Empresa here, ‘The Fiesta del Toro is an economic engine that not only generates employment but also produces good returns and feeds thousands of families. According to the Junta de Andalucía in Spain this sector moves 2,500 million euros and in Andalucía about 500 million. As for the number of employment, the Fiesta Nacional is worth somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000 direct jobs...’.

Bullfighting is a sensitive issue of course – most Europeans don’t like it – but to misrepresent it so banally to the expatriate readers to, what, gather ‘likes’ on the Facebook page (?) seems a little silly, because it begs the larger question – what else is being misrepresented in the expat press?

In other news, and no doubt to the disgust of the anti-taurinos, the Coliseo Balear de Palma de Mallorca celebrates its ninetieth anniversary this year and they will have a bullfight there on August 9th – the first since the recent local prohibitions were cast down as unlawful by the Spanish government.