The Pamplona Post

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, who put together Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona – with a foreword from the Mayor of Pamplona, and contributions by John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest, Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson, as well as bull-runners like Joe Distler and Julen Madina and photography by EPA veteran Jim Hollander – opens this week’s edition of ¡Hola! magazine, the Spanish parent of Hello! Read the English version of his interview on his personal blog here.

The Editor

… the new post will be up in one hour… The Editor

(Meanwhile, read Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona)

Here, here.

The Editor

As Graham Keeley in The Times of London writes today, despite my 4,000-word post (recently extended) on the art of toreo below, it is the risk that makes it ‘real’ as Adolfo Suarez Illana used to say to me in the ring, ‘authentic’ as one Andalusian government official called it to me last Thursday, ‘the last serious thing left in the world today’ as the poet Federico Garcia Lorca put it.

I saw David Mora do amazing work in the ring in Seville two weeks ago today, and the other two toreros last year. I wish them well and a quick and complete recovery. Unlike my rather grotesque and viciously moralising compatriots writing in the comments section of The Times, who are like another Taliban in their own petit way, and who seem too dim or venomous to realise…
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From our friend in the south…

The Editor

José Mari Manzanares shows his art in Jerez

Cristina Ybarra presents her poster for the Rocío pilgrimage in the Salón de Borbón at the Ayuntiamento, ‘City Hall’, of Seville

On Friday morning we took the train from Seville to Jerez and the temperature went south alongside us to a bearable 30 degrees. We exited the world of Ybarras and (encaste) Ibarra, Borbóns and (liquid) bourbon, and entered the land of horses and Domecqs. (For a story about my Zippo lighter, see Cristina Ybarra’s blog here.)

As I said in my last post, the bulls and bullfights of the Feria de Abril of Seville had been bad – the bullfighters unable to show either art with them or skill. I have written before – on this blog, in my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight – that large bulls, such as a first category bull-ring like Seville requires by law, have a far greater probability of being unfightable than the smaller ones found in a second category bullring like Jerez de la Frontera.

As the Royal Decree No. 145 of February 2nd, 1996, states in Article 46:

The minimum weight of animals in bullfights will be from 460kg in rings of the first category, from 435 in those of the second and 410 in those of the third.

Now, all aficionados look at the weight of bulls before they enter the ring, however, often they do not look – and in certain rings they do not publish – and the equally important age of the animal, which, of course, bears a varying and indirec relation to its weight. The toreros, ‘bullfighters’, I know and have fought with all spoke as often about age as size or horn type. A year in a bull’s life is a long time. So, although the same Royal Decree pronounces in the preceding article, 45, that –

The males that are destined to be fought in bullfights should be as a minimum four full years and in every case less than six.

– this still offers a two year range which is the difference between headlong aggression and a more judicious and challenging approach to what the bull perceives as a combat.
Of the El Pilar bulls we saw in Seville not only were four over 550kg, but four were also over five years old (three of both fours being the same bulls). In part this explained their lack nobleza, ‘nobility’, a concept which can be explicated in terms of unquestioning aggression or volatile stupidity, depending on your viewpoint. (The high casuality rate among the officer class in all conflicts leading up to and including the First World War in no way springs to mind. The full nature of the toro bravo I go into in one of the ‘pages’ listed top right of this website. For those whose main interest is how bullfighting can still exist in the modern world – the ethics – or why I refer to its as an art – the aesthetics – or a breakdown of the three act structure of a corrida – capote-picador, banderillas, muleta-sword – there are also ‘pages’ there on these topics.)

When you combine these old wise bulls who ‘speak Latin and Greek’, as the saying goes, with young unknown – or older and relatively little known – toreros the audience of Seville vote with their feet and wallets, not least because bad toros and toreros cost no less than great ones at the Maestranza box office (photo above), and you’d do better to spend your money on a cocktail at the Hotel Alfonso XIII (photo left), and read the critics in the Spanish newspapers bemoan the lack of a single true toro in the whole damned feria (photo below.)

The Spanish newspaper ABC bemoans the lack of bulls with the headline ‘When there is raw material’ (click to enlarge)

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News of the bulls from the south of Spain. Let us hope by the time they come north, they’re in better shape…

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The Editor

I submitted this article for my column in Taki’s Magazine. However, I was told by the editor that she’d had quite enough about bulls. Which is ironic, given what it says. Anyway, here it is, for what it’s worth.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Alexander Fiske-Harrison waiting for the bulls, Cuéllar 2013 (Photo: Enrique Madroño Arranz)

Dead Gods With Cold Eyes

I nearly died the other day. Not, like the time before when John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson, pulled me out from a stampede in Pamplona or the time before that when Eduardo Dávila Miura pulled me out of a bull-ring in Palma del Río. This time was for real.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison begins to run with the bulls, Cuéllar 2013 (Photo: Enrique Madroño Arranz)

I was running with the bulls of Cuéllar, which is a much like running with the bulls of Pamplona, only the town is smaller, the encierro – ‘bull-run’ – more ancient (the most ancient, in fact, as I wrote in the Financial Times), less crowded, and those that do turn up are mainly local, all Spanish, with not a drunk or first-timer among them.

Despite this I still managed to bump into someone as I passed a lone, stationary bull in a narrow stretch of street. Being lighter than me, he was knocked to safety, but I dropped where I was and the commotion drew the bull’s eyes – black, bovine, lifeless and colour-blind, following only movement – and it charged across the street, skittering to a halt on its hooves as I similarly fought for grip in my new, untested running shoes.

With my back against the wall, its horns either side of my chest – literally – and, unlike in Pamplona or an official plaza de toros, no surgeon within a forty-five minute drive, I saw my own death ahead of me. However, for some reason the bull decided today was not my day and moved on, most likely because I had the presence of mind to freeze, making myself invisible to the clockwork brain behind the horns.

Read on at The Last Arena by clicking here.

A fortnight ago I accepted a prize from the most ancient encierros, ‘bull-runs’, in all of Spain, those of the town of Cuéllar.

Earlier that morning I nearly died while running them. The bull in the photo-detail below was suelto – ‘loose’, alone – and faced away from me when I seized what I thought was a chance and tried to run past it in the narrow street.

At the same moment, another runner tried to do exactly the same from the other direction. When we collided, both of us with eyes only on the bull, he was bounced clear to safety while I lost my footing on the slippery street at the very instant the bull caught our movement in its peripheral vision and charged me as I struggled to get upright with my back against the fence.

In this moment – which lasted as infinitely long as all the novelists, journalists and diarists of near-death say it does – I stood so still as to render myself invisible to the bull whose horn points were paused either side of my chest. Read on at The Last Arena here.