You know that tiny songbird that billionaires gobble furtively and illegally, the ortolan? It is kept caged in darkness so that it gorges on figs, and then drowned in Armagnac. Gourmands cover their heads with napkins as they pop the morsel in their mouths, supposedly to hide their gluttony from God.
Well, I have just luxuriated in the taurine equivalent, spending a weekend gawping at bulls with the rarest and most exalted lineages in Spain.
To grasp what made them such aristocrats, we need to recap a little. I have written before about the difference between toreristas (who go to the ring to see artistry from the bullfighters) and toristas (who go to revere the bulls). Most people start in the former category, the proper study of mankind being man and all that. But as they become serious about bullfighting, they almost always swing to the other extreme, becoming obsessed with bloodlines.
Some eventually drift back to a middle position, acknowledging the depth and variety of at least some of the breeds that, in their hardline torista phase, they had dismissed as soulless and mass-produced. Others plunge deeper and deeper into the world of genetics, delighting in the proper morphology of each caste. These people often wear on their shirts or wristbands the brands of their favourite ranches (it is not often that we get to use the word “brand” literally).
A French friend became so Platonic in his torismo that he eventually gave up going to corridas altogether. Instead, he would attend the sorteo, the morning ritual at which bulls are divided into pairs, and lots drawn to decide which pair will face which matador. He would stare intently at the animals, devouring them with his eyes, noting every stamped hoof, every flicked ear. Then he would go home and, in his mind, he would construct the perfect performance for each bull.
You don’t have to be as purist as him to feel that the balance in the fiesta is out of whack. Ninety per cent of the bulls that appear in first-category rings are of torerista stock — bred to enable liquid sculpture by the matadors rather than to communicate danger.
During lockdown, a group of Madrileño toristas decided to do something about it. If no Spanish plaza was offering the kinds of bulls they wanted to see, they would organise their own corridas. So was born the Club 3 Puyazos, as discerning and demanding a group of spectators as ever filled a plaza.
Looking for a suitable bullring, they settled on the dormitory town of San Agustín de Guadalix, 45 minutes’ drive outside Madrid towards the Guadarrama heights. There, since 2022, they have held their annual Feria del Aficionado.
Had you been in that unlikely venue last weekend, you would have found yourself among aficionados from all over the world. I met Americans, Italians and a Swede. Eighteen members of the Club Taurino of London had made the pilgrimage. Perhaps a quarter of the audience was French, for the French have always had a deep torista tradition, and the only festival that resembles that in San Agustín takes place in Céret, a Catalan-speaking town in the northern foothills of the Pyrenees. (Catalans in Spain reject toreo to emphasise their distance from Madrid; Catalans in France embrace it to emphasise their distance from Paris.)
People will travel long distances to see rare pedigrees, and these bulls came close to the torista archetype: handsome, serious, en tipo, well-armed (ie, having properly configured horns) and with some of the most recherché family trees in Iberia.
Here were scions of the ancient house of Barcial, the root of so many patrician lines, vast and piebald, like Goya prints come to life. Here the fierce animals of Prieto de la Cal, wild on entering the ring, strong against the picadors’ lances, their pelts that characteristic creamy-yellow colour that is known in bulls as “jabonero”. Here the hard, squat, matt black bulls of Celestino Cuadri, their horns low and lethal. Here the almost unknown bulls of Alicia Chico, from the overlooked town of Teruel (“Teruel exists” was the motto adopted by the town council, later the name of a local political party), the last herd in Spain still to be herded annually to far winter pastures.
Members of the Club 3 Puyazos vote for the breeds they want to see, and then send a committee to select the individual animals. This year, as usual, club members voted to include the ranch of Dolores Aguirre, whose eponymous founder used to be known in the press as “la Margaret Tatcher” of breeders, and whose herd, since her death in 2013, has been owned by her daughter, Isabel Lipperheide Aguirre — a glamorous woman who is reassuringly hard on herself if her bloodstock fails to meet her standards.
The Feria del Aficionado, in short, restores the primary element to its proper place. The brand of each ranch is not only traced out in the sands, but painted onto the burladeros (the entrances through which toreros slip in and out of the ring). The banderillas (the barbed sticks) are decorated in each breed’s colours.
Such is the attention to detail when everyone involved is a torista. And I mean everyone. Not just the people who select the bulls, but the people who check your ticket at the door, the people who rake the arena (never have I seen sand more lovingly smoothed), the chap who opens the gate through which the bull enters — all are members of the club, all taking time out of their lives as surgeons, novelists or professors. The club photographer, a man with a genius for composition, is the British aficionado Andrew Moore. (You can see his work here.)
“I hate when people talk about torista versus torerista events,” says Alberto Palacios, a lawyer in his late thirties who serves as President of the Club. “The fiesta is torista by definition, because its chief protagonist is the bull. The trouble is that toreros would rather not face intact and serious animals like ours. They find them uncomfortable”.
Acknowledging the supremacy of the bull means restoring the importance of the tercio de varas, when the bull proves his courage by charging repeatedly at the mounted picador.
Again, a quick recap. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, picadors’ horses were unprotected, and often died on the horns. Hemingway, writing just before the horses were barded, believed that their deaths did not detract from the central tragedy, namely the death of the bull. The tragedy in the horse’s life, he argued, had occurred much earlier, when became too old to work and it was destined either for the bullring or the glue factory.
In those early days, the picadors — often known as varilargueros, long-lancers — were given prominence in the programme. To protect their mounts, they had to be skilful, landing the tip of their lance on the bull’s morillo, the bunched tossing-muscle at the crown of its shoulders. The lance has a crossbar, limiting how much damage it can do, and a deft picador would hold the bull off, pivoting his horse so that the horns never made contact.
From the late nineteenth century, some horses began to be given protective caparisons and, in 1928, it became mandatory. Since then, every picador’s horse has worn a peto, a strong mattress-like cover that shields it from the horns – though a full charge, if the picador does not slow it, will still topple beast and rider. The introduction of the peto allowed picadors to become complacent. Some would let the bull reach their mount before using their lances properly. Such was the combined weight of horse, peto and man that the bull would need to hit them at full tilt to overthrow them.
Then, starting in France in the 1990s, there was a revival of interest in the tercio de varas as an art. Picadors were given sleeker horses, and petos were made of the light industrial material Kevlar. Picadors once again had to work to remain in their saddles, and became once again a feature of the corrida, with fine performances winning them laps of honour.
The Club 3 Puyazos goes one step further. Its members insist that each bull charge at least three times at the lance: hence their club’s name. The longer the charge, the braver the bull. And, of course, the more aesthetic the effect, for few sights on God’s earth are lovelier than a Spanish fighting bull in motion. The picador who elicits the bravest charges from his adversary is awarded a prize.
The bravest bull of the weekend was Bronceado, one of three from the ranch of Celestino Cuadri, strong as the Andalusian sun, black as Asturian jet. He charged, not from anger, but from considered and deliberate courage, four times against the horse. Nor did he slow after that, constantly lowering his head for an upward thrust that never came, a pistol that was cocked but not fired.
When Bronceado died, still trying to lunge with his last drops of vitality, his mouth shut to hold in his blood, the crowd demanded a lap of honour. Several of us waved blue handkerchiefs, which is how the president signals such an award. Most corrida-goers don’t carry blue hankies but, as you’ll have gathered by now, this was no ordinary crowd. My hankie — actually a blue neckerchief that I picked up at the bullfights in Bilbao some years ago — flapped alongside others, and we applauded with profound and pure emotion as Bronceado was paraded before us in death.
The bulls were always going to be the stars of the show
By contrast, my white hankie — the way to petition an ear for a successful matador — never left my pocket. Any man prepared to go up against these bulls is brave, but none shone. The best of them, the Asturian Damián Castaño who specialises in torista breeds, elicited some beautiful passes, but his capework was not matched by his bladework. As throughout his career, this solid and courageous man was checked by his inability to kill well.
No one, though, was terribly interested. The bulls were always going to be the stars of the show.
One of the things that British people often say about corridas is that they are “on the bull’s side”. It is, in the way that they mean it, a silly sentiment. Almost every corrida ends with the bull’s death, and the only question is whether the officiating matador is brave enough to give the bull the solemn and beautiful death it deserves.
But if by “on the bull’s side” you mean entering into its mind, understanding how its field of vision differs from a human being’s, sensing which parts of the ring make it comfortable, knowing at what distance it will charge — in short, fully empathising with it, in a way that people rarely don’t do with any animal except some dogs — then this is the fiesta for you.
