The Man with a Cape

 

Dah da da Dahh.. Have you ever been to a bullfight?

It’s the season for the toros right now, with the Pamplona ‘running of the bulls’ coming up in July. I was there one year – I would have been around 25 – and ended up drinking all night with some locals, and then early the next morning, armed only with rolled-up newspapers, we were chased through the streets by a dozen angry bulls.

I’m never doing that again.

Bullfights are part of the culture here. They are something quintessentially Spanish and, what with anything to do with tradition, flags, the municipal band playing pasodobles, the crowds waving their white handkerchiefs and shouting ¡Olé! every moment there’s a good-looking pass, the matador being taken out of the Puerta Grande on the shoulders of the fans…

…it’s really no wonder that the far-right movement here has taken la corrida as their own, although, in reality, it has support from various sectors of society and besides, is protected as a ‘cultural patrimony’.

We foreigners erroneously call it ‘a sport’, but it’s a cultural event really. Sort of.

Let’s just leave that for a moment and drop by one of Spain’s most beautiful and enlightened regions, to see what’s happening in the levante.

Right now, as the Partido Popular cosies up with Vox thanks to the vagaries of the conservative voters, in Valencia everyone (well, of the right wing persuasion anyway) was shaking hands and slapping each other on the back as the deal was struck for the region’s Generalitat, or parliament, for the next four years. The PP leader is the new president and the Vox leader, for some reasons to do with his past, was kicked upstairs to become a candidate for the General Elections next month. His second-in-command thus takes over from him as regional vice-president and, why not, secretary for culture.

This august personage is Vicente Barrera, a retired bullfighter.

Putting, as it were, the vox among the chickens.

As the debate rages in Spain about la tauromaquia – whether it should keep its status or be quietly marched off into the pages of history – we have a senior politician, an ex-bullfighter no less, in charge of culture in Spain’s fourth most populous region which includes the country’s third largest city.  

One wonders if the post of education will go to a priest, and that of health to a faith-healer.