I read a nice piece on matadors in Catalonia the other day entitled twighlight of the matadors and it spoke about how a select group of people want to put an end to what many regard as part of the local culture – bullfighting. It spoke about José Tomás who some regard as the last best hope for bullfighting. He is rather a reclusive chap but pulls in the crowds nonetheless.

José Tomás retired in 2002, at only 27 years of age and at the height of his fame, only to return unexpectedly five years later in Barcelona for what turned out to be the first sell-out in 20 years at the 19,000-seat Plaza Monumental, the city’s beautiful old brick-and-tile bullring near La Sagrada Familia Temple.

One interesting he notes is is that during the early years of the last century,Barcelona had no fewer than three bullrings. It was a mecca for aficionados. There were more corridas there from the 1920s to the 1960s than in any other Spanish city. Now a referendum before the Catalan parliament would end bullfighting altogether and the aficionados are getting worried. Catalan nationalists began to spread the notion that toreo was an imposition on Catalonia by Franco’s fascist regime, which promoted it, like flamenco, as a patriotic symbol. Opposition to bullfighting became a declaration of separatism by other means.Animal rights came along and fueled the nationalists’ agenda. That the issue remains, above all, political is demonstrated over the border, in the Catalan region of southern France, where bullfighting is embraced as fiercely as it is opposed in Spanish Catalonia, for exactly the same separatist reasons, in that case because it is banned in Paris.

“At a point when Europe is becoming bigger and more multicultural, Barcelona is becoming smaller and more Catalan,” is how Robert Elms, a British travel writer who has lived there, saw the situation. “It’s vanity,” he said “That’s the only word.Vanity describes an insecure culture.” The possible ban on bullfighting, he added, is akin to a law requiring school children to receive much of their education in Catalan, not Spanish. Paco March nodded at the mention of that connection. A Barcelona native, he is the bullfighting columnist for La Vanguardia ,the city’s second biggest newspaper. “I feel rage that in the name of democracy, “Mr March said of the pending referendum,”a minority of opponents of toreo could erase the rights of another minority, aficionados, who are enjoying what is in this country a legal spectacle that expresses deep truths about life and death taken to their extreme.”

“This artful corrida (bullfight) to end the season may have been the last in this plaza,” lamented El Pais , the Spanish newspaper, the next morning.”What a shame if politicians banned bullfighting here.” Sr. March, the bullfighting writer from La Vanguardia , put it more bluntly. “We want to be different from the rest of Spain by not killing bulls,” he said.”But we’re just killing off our own culture.”