End of a bullfighting era | Christopher North

He looked almost like of one of those Thunderbirds puppets, with jerky, unnatural movements. Usually, when a matador is carried in triumph from the ring, a single man bears him on his shoulders. But Morante de la Puebla, a big figure in every sense, was perched awkwardly on the shoulders of two men who were thrust together and apart as the accompanying mob surged through the Puerta Grande, the exit reserved for bullfighters who have cut two ears in the world’s toughest plaza.

You could hear the roar all the way down the Calle de Alcalá: “¡To-re-ro! ¡To-re-ro! ¡To-re-ro!” Madrid had not seen anything like it since 1991, when César Rincón, that deft and dazzling Colombian, opened the Puerta Grande four times in one season, a feat that will surely never be repeated.

Rincón had peaked early. The sweetest-natured of men, he never recovered the form of that extraordinary season (it emerged years afterwards that he had contracted hepatitis from a blood transfusion after a goring, and it affected his performance). Morante’s triumph, by contrast, came at the end of a 28-year career that has no parallel in bullfighting.

Like most of the great artistic matadors, from Joselito in the 1910s and Pepe Luis Vázquez in the 1940s to Curro Romero in the 1960s and Rafael de Paula (briefly Morante’s manager) in the 1970s, he is from Seville. Indeed, the word “sevillano”, in the context of bullfighting, means a fluid, rhythmic, terpsichorean style. Unusually for a Sevillian, Morante had no family connection to the business. He learned his craft, not in a taurine school, but in the open fields.

In 1997, Morante took his alternativa (his taurine graduation ceremony, so to speak) from the hands, appropriately enough, of Rincón, and immediately set about dividing the critics. Even the most fanatical morantistas allowed that he was temperamental. When he didn’t like the way a bull looked at him, he would let his chief assistant, his peón de confianza, take it to the horse, and then move almost immediately to the kill. His disregard for paying punters often crossed into contempt.

At the same time, not even his fiercest detractors denied his brilliance when he drew a bull that he liked. He would stand extraordinarily close to his animal and hypnotise it with the lure. He had a way of dropping his wrist immediately in front of the horns — a pass known as a trincherazo — that no one in Spain could equal. But the effect was often marred by his tendency to scuttle, sometimes in an ugly half-crouch, between passes.

Then came the lockdown, a long night from which it seemed, for a while, that the fiesta might not wake. And from that dark chrysalis came a new Morante, spreading glorious chromatic wings.

Part of his metamorphosis was sartorial. Morante had always had a distinct style. Most toreros line their hot pink two-handed capotes in yellow, but Morante lines his with the pastel green of the anti-immigration Vox party. When he came back for the post-lockdown season of 2021, it was in the costume of a nineteenth-century bullfighter. His montera (his bullfighter’s hat) was wider, his suit of lights more elaborately embroidered, the jacket slashed to reveal silk lining — a homage to the tragic Joselito.

His second bull was as black as the devil and almost as cunning

Each subsequent season brought more vestiary innovations. In Madrid last week, close examination revealed that his montera was not the standard black, but a very deep blue, matching his suit-of-lights. (One of the peculiar traditions of bullfighting is that toreros’ suits are always ascribed recherché colours. No one ever wears red, green or blue. It is always “young Rioja”, “fresh basil”, “mid-afternoon sky” or whatever.)

The real change in his style, though, was physical. He was now unhurried and graceful, pivoting between his passes as though there were no bull present. He exhibited almost unbelievable control, bewitching his bulls so that they slowed mid-charge and followed his cloth obediently.

In 2021, before his home crowd, he gave one of the finest performances I expect ever to see in a bullring. Describing it in these pages at the time, I wrote that, if even Morante’s wizardry did not earn him a tail, then Seville had “turned its back on tails”.

I was wrong. The following year he put in an even better technical performance, albeit with such a cussed and difficult bull that trophies were not on the agenda. Then, in 2023, he achieved the impossible, cutting the first tail in Seville since 1971.

After that victory, only one thing eluded him. He had never opened Madrid’s Puerta Grande. To be awarded a triumph in the capital, as in most rings, a matador must cut at least two ears (Seville, eccentrically, insists on three). But ears in Madrid are not easily severed. The tiniest imperfection — for example, a sword-thrust that drops the bull quickly and efficiently, but that is judged slightly off-centre — costs you the trophy that any other public in the world would have awarded.

Last year, at the height of his fame, Morante came to Madrid, took against one of his bulls and did nothing, making the crowd incandescent.

Madrid was close to setting its face permanently against the man from its rival city, a man who took his very name from one of Seville’s districts.

Morante, meanwhile, was struggling outside the ring. Plagued all his life by mental health problems, he revealed that he had had electric shock therapy for depression, and that a side-effect was that he could no longer remember the evening that he cut the tail in Seville — a revelation so sad that it almost made me weep. After his failure in Madrid last year, he talked of retiring.

This season was his last throw of the dice. Once again, he had triumphed in April on the bright yellow sands of Seville, and once again he had disappointed in May on the dull beige sands of Madrid. The crowd, especially the screeching Yahoos in Madrid’s infamous Section Seven, had written him off. But he had one last scheduled appearance, on the final day of the Madrid feria. It made him, and it made history.

How to describe what he did? Let’s start with the bulls, They were Juan Pedro Domecqs, his favourite breed, with deep chests and sleek hindquarters. This was the bloodline before which he had triumphed in Seville in 2021 and 2023; and also that before which he had disgraced himself in Madrid in 2024.

When juampedros are good, they charge cleanly, strongly and repeatedly, becoming neither defensive (holding their ground and waiting for the matador to come to them) nor wise (learning the difference between man and cloth). When they are bad, they run out of steam, often a problem in Madrid, which demands heavier bulls — heavier, at any rate, than juampedros are meant to be.

Last week, Morante drew an exemplar from each end of the spectrum. His first, a huge and handsome chestnut with lighter circles around his eyes (what aficionados, who have names for every possible colour and configuration of pelt, call “partridge”) was magnificent, combining the nobility of a classic Domecq with bottomless energy. Morante dedicated him to the Infanta Elena, lobbing his midnight-blue montera up to the delighted princess. Everything else, he threw into his performance. He began with his filigree capote sculptures, something that no other torero in Spain can equal, and he ended with a perfect blade. In any other ring, he would have won both ears. Even in Madrid, he might have done, but for his history with the crowd. He had to settle, in the event, for one.

His second bull was as black as the devil and almost as cunning. The audience readied itself for the same contemptuous non-attempt that it had witnessed ten days earlier, and that had driven it to fury the year before. But something else happened. Morante saw a spark of potential in the juampedro and fanned it delicately until it began to blaze. The bull, indifferent before the picador and halting in the muleta, was ensorcelled. At the end, Morante gave a circular series with his left hand that was so gentle and so close that I would not have believed it possible. I must have watched it on repeat a hundred times since — every aficionado in Spain has set it to music or turned it into a meme — and each time I struggle to believe that I am not watching in slow-motion.

Morante profiled with a rapt expression on his face, and threw himself into the sword-thrust. His entry was perfect, but his blade was fractionally low. Would the Madrid crowd stand pompously on that tiny imperfection and deny him his triumph? No. Caught up in the beauty of that final series, and aware that they ought really to have given him two ears from his first bull, they brought out their white handkerchiefs and made the moment eternal.

At the end, the crowd surged onto the sands, led by youngsters from Madrid’s taurine school, who knew how complicated the second bull had been, and understood the magnitude of Morante’s achievement. No one in the city’s bars talked of anything else.

A crowd gathered outside the Wellington Hotel, the spiritual home of toreo, chanting in a pulsing iambic hexameter: “¡José Antonio! ¡Morante de la Puebla!” Eventually, their hero stepped onto the balcony, still wearing that slightly unearthly expression he had taken on during his second bull.

I suspect Morante will retire now, weeping like Alexander because there are no more lands to conquer. It feels as if the age of giants is coming to an end. El Juli retired in 2023. José Tomás has not appeared since 2022 (though actually retiring would require that most enigmatic of matadors to say something, which he never does). Peru’s Andrés Roca Rey is still working his miracles on the sands, but he has no rival when it comes to filling a plaza.

When aficionados talk of the Golden Age, they mean the seasons of 1913 to 1920, when Belmonte and Joselito dominated the rings. But I think we will look back on the first quarter of this century as a second golden age, its bulls more reliable, its matadors more varied. Until now. The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of.