Last weekend, we ran a news article on a retired bullfighter who had been gored to death while helping to prepare a bullfight.
The reaction on our social media channels to this bizarre twist of fate was one of elation and vindication among our readers rather than shock or sadness.
“Whoop I love it when the bull wins,” one person celebrated.
“Men in tights 0, Bull 1” another one joked.
“How many ears was the bull allowed to cut off from the torero?” one reader asked.
As I trawled through the comments in which “karma” and “revenge” were regularly referenced, I realised that I couldn’t remember ever hearing or reading a foreigner speak positively about bullfighting.
The only exception that came to mind was Ernest Hemingway, who was very much a man of his time (100 years ago, that is).
Bullfighting seems to be the element of Spanish ‘culture’ that foreigners are most willing to be openly against.
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Even those who want to keep an open mind and see a corrida (bullfight) for themselves are usually quick to pick a side once they’ve seen what it’s all about .
In 2019, El País sent a reporter to Las Ventas bullring in Madrid to track down tourists who had decided to watch a bullfight.
Obviously, the likelihood of encountering foreigners who were on the fence about this man vs bull ‘spectacle’ was higher than usual in this location.
One holidaymaker described it almost as a “religious” experience, a little girl said it was “cool” but “scary”.
A Dutch couple didn’t go into it prepared, saying “we thought it was going to be a show without knives or violence” and that they were “really mad because I paid money to watch an animal die”.
Others who knew the bulls always get killed said the best part was “when the bull pushed the bullfighter over” and that they wouldn’t be going to any other bullfights.
Online the English-language discussion over bullfighting is much more in the against camp.
There are countless campaigns and non-profits fighting against the practice, as well as Reddit and Quora threads in which Spaniards ask foreigners why they are against bullfighting, and the answers are what you’d expect.
Not that tauromaquia (bullfighting) is loved by all Spanish people - far from it.
Unfortunately, there are huge disparities in surveys regarding bullfighting depending on the source (political inclinations and vested interests no doubt playing a role), making it virtually impossible to truly know how much support there really is for it among the Spanish population.
For example, a 2025 survey by Sigma Dos for Spanish daily El Mundo found that 78 percent of Spanish people say they are not bullfighting fans, but less than half (48 percent) would be in favour of repealing the cultural protection bullfighting given to it by government.
Perhaps many Spaniards are not really sure how they feel about a tradition that they’ve been exposed to directly or indirectly all their lives.
For foreigners, however, bullfighting is probably the world’s most obvious example of killing animals for sport, and the practice hasn’t been normalised for them since childhood, which explains why most see it as barbaric.
For us at The Local, one thing is clear: whenever news breaks that a bullfighter has been killed, we know what the reaction from our readers is going to be.
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