Ole!

Our first stop in our very short tour of Spain was Seville, which in my opinion is the most beautiful of the three cities we stayed in – Seville, Madrid and Barcelona.

Seville was in the hands of the Moors for hundreds of years before being taken back by the Catholics and so the architecture is very Islamic and quite different from the other cities in the north.

We thought about doing someothing really Spanish and going to a bullfight, however there were none scheduled in Seville while we were there, so we went to the bullfighting museum instead.  This consisted of a lot of bulls heads mounted on the walls and a whole gallery of paintings depicting bulls, horses, dogs and sometimes men in various states of their intestines being dragged out!

When we arrived in Madrid, it was the weekend and we found that the bullfights are televised, similar to the football at home.  The telecast begins about a half hour before it all starts where the commentators talk about the various matadors and how great a season they’ve been having and what they expect to happen in the ensuing fight. 

The vision flicks to out the back to show the Matador limbering up.  Apparently they need assistance to get into their fancy outfits – presumably men can’t pull up their own tights!

There’s no mention of the bull until he is released into the ring.  Obviously he is stirred up a bit out the back because he thunders into the ring with his eyes wild, already a bit crazed. 

Over the next 20 minutes, the matador and his mates spend their time weakening him by spearing him in the neck and shoulder and exhausting him by taunting him with the movement of the cape. 

It doesn’t take long before he is covered in blood, his eyes are rolling around in his head and his tongue is hanging out.  The crowd, who have paid rock concert type prices for their seats, scream and yell like they’re at the MCG and encourage the matador into the final act.  The idea is that he takes a small sword and plunges it through a gap in the vertebrae, into the bull’s heart by getting the bull to lower his head to charge.

Unfortunately, as we were to discover, this doesn’t always go to plan.  One bull we saw, stood looking at the matador, sword sticking out of his neck, not dead.  Oops!  Took a little bit of jiggling the sword and fiddling around before the bull finally got his lines right and ceremoniously fell to the ground.

Needless to say, after watching that, we were not inclined to go watch in person!  We just stuck with the normal sightseeing..