The last spectacle of cruelty and why bullfighting is not culture

Civilization has always liked to believe in its own progress. We repeat to ourselves that reason triumphed over savagery, that ethics replaced instinct, and that compassion finally conquered spectacle. But every time the gates of a bullring open and the crowd erupts in applause for a ritualized killing, that illusion collapses. In those moments, it becomes clear that cruelty still wears the mask of culture, and that Spain, despite its modern façade, continues to celebrate death as tradition.

Bullfighting is often presented as an art form, a dance between man and beast, a poetic duel of skill and courage. Yet beneath the rhetoric of elegance lies a carefully orchestrated act of domination. The bull never has a chance to win. Long before the first trumpet sounds, it has been beaten, bled, and weakened to ensure predictability. The “fight” that follows is theater, not combat. The outcome is certain; the death, guaranteed.

Those who defend this brutality speak of heritage, of identity, of beauty. They describe the arena as a sacred stage where humanity confronts mortality. But the only thing confronted there is empathy. What they call bravery is a ritual of control, a choreography built upon the suffering of an animal that was first betrayed by those who raised it. This is not art. It is anatomy rehearsed for applause.

And yet, the defense continues. Spain has made bullfighting a “Property of Cultural Interest”, securing it through law and public funds. Politicians invoke the language of culture to justify cruelty, transforming violence into an emblem of authenticity. Behind this mask stands a powerful network of landowners, media figures, and financial interests that profit from the spectacle. The system protects itself by claiming that without bullfighting, the bull would vanish. The argument is absurd. No species depends on torture for survival.

Before each fight, the animal is stabbed, electrocuted, or drugged to guarantee exhaustion. Its eyes are sometimes smeared with petroleum to blur vision; its legs bruised to slow its movement. By the time it enters the arena, the “bravery” that audiences cheer is little more than the animal’s panic. Veterinarians and officials, fully aware of this, lend legitimacy to the process. Their silence is paid for, their complicity hidden behind the language of inspection. The cruelty is not only in the arena, it extends through the entire chain of approval.

What sustains this horror is not passion but profit. Bullfighting generates millions through tourism, broadcasting, and subsidies disguised as cultural funding. The same politicians who cut budgets for education and health defend these subsidies as defense of “tradition”. And the far right, always eager to frame cruelty as patriotism, calls opposition to bullfighting “an attack on Spain itself”. To them, empathy is treason.

But the truth remains simple: no civilization worthy of that name can celebrate torture as art. Bullfighting belongs to the past not because it is old, but because it is obsolete. Every era must confront its own barbarism, and this one hides behind red capes and gilded jackets. Spain’s persistence in this spectacle does not honor its history, it betrays it. The country that produced Cervantes and Goya, whose art has illuminated humanity, now spends public money sanctifying blood.

The only moment when justice breathes inside that circle of cruelty is when the ritual turns against itself, when the bull survives, attacks, and kills the bullfighter. Those rare moments, when death refuses choreography, are not tragedies but revelations. They expose what the crowd refuses to see: that life resists humiliation. In that brief reversal, cruelty meets its reflection. It is divine justice, not because it restores balance, but because it reminds us of what should never have needed restoring.

I do not rejoice in suffering, but I cannot deny the relief it brings when the executioner falls. It is the only instant when the helpless find consolation, when nature avenges what civilization refuses to correct. Cruelty repaid with cruelty becomes the last form of equilibrium left in a system built on impunity.

Defenders of bullfighting will argue that to abolish it would mean erasing Spanish culture. Yet culture that requires pain to exist is not heritage, it is pathology. Traditions should evolve with conscience, not fossilize around violence. To glorify this spectacle is to mistake endurance for virtue, and brutality for art.

Every society preserves a relic of its own shame, a reminder of what it once accepted as normal. Bullfighting is Spain’s. It stands as the country’s most visible contradiction: a modern democracy hosting medieval cruelty for entertainment, defending it with laws and pride. Culture is not what we inherit; it is what we choose to continue. And the choice to preserve blood as theater reveals how far we still are from true civilization.

The spectacle of pain

Violence becomes tolerable when it is aestheticized. Bullfighting survives not because of its cruelty, but because of its choreography. It transforms agony into performance, and death into design. The moment the bull enters the arena, the crowd does not see an animal, they see an image, a projection of what they’ve been taught to admire: bravery, defiance, raw instinct. The blood that follows is framed as beauty. In this distortion lies the mechanism that sustains the spectacle.

Every element of the bullring is designed to separate perception from reality. The costumes, the music, the choreography of movement, all function as ritual anesthesia. Pain becomes invisible behind symbolism. The matador’s gestures, taught and perfected for decades, are not acts of respect but of control. The animal’s resistance is reduced to rhythm; its suffering, to spectacle. In that moment, morality dissolves into applause.

This transformation of cruelty into culture is not unique to Spain, but in bullfighting, it reaches its purest form. The event is not spontaneous; it is rehearsed ritual. From the trumpet that signals the entrance to the methodical sequence of stabs and taunts, everything obeys the grammar of performance. The bull’s pain has been scripted. Even its death is expected to occur on cue, with the matador striking in the precise pose that centuries of propaganda have declared “heroic”.

The audience, hypnotized by the narrative, plays its role. It must not think, it must react. The shouts, the waves of the handkerchiefs, the collective trance: these are not expressions of joy but of denial. They erase empathy through rhythm. The ring becomes a laboratory of moral disassociation, where beauty justifies everything it destroys.

The aesthetic defense of bullfighting, its supposed “artistic” nature, is the greatest triumph of this disassociation. To call suffering art is to invent a vocabulary that absolves cruelty. Those who attend do not see torture; they see “tradition”. They see “valor”. They see “ritual”. These words, polished over centuries, serve as shields against guilt. They are the intellectual architecture of barbarism.

To understand why this spectacle persists, one must look at what it offers emotionally. Bullfighting provides a simulation of power in a world where most spectators feel powerless. Watching life and death unfold before them grants a fleeting illusion of mastery. The matador becomes a projection of control, the human who defies fear, the citizen who commands chaos. It is no coincidence that the rhetoric surrounding bullfighting glorifies masculinity, dominance, and nationalism. The ring becomes an altar for outdated ideals.

Yet the cruelty does not end in the arena. Across Spain, variations of the same savagery appear under local disguises, each defended as folklore. In many villages, bulls are set loose through narrow streets with flaming balls affixed to their horns, an event known as the toro embolado. Blinded by smoke and terrified by the fire, the animal charges aimlessly until it collapses or dies from shock and exhaustion. The participants laugh, drink, and call it tradition. What they celebrate as courage is in fact desperation; what they call heritage is merely cruelty that has learned to disguise itself as entertainment. These festivities, scattered across provinces and sanctified by habit, reveal how barbarism has woven itself into daily life, far beyond the bullring.

The cruelty, therefore, is not hidden by accident; it is hidden by design. The system depends on it. To expose the suffering would be to dismantle the myth. This is why images of the bull’s preparation are rarely shown, and why television coverage avoids close-ups of its agony. The public must never see the truth behind the art. Pain must remain offstage for beauty to exist.

What happens in the arena is the end of a process that began long before, the culmination of systemic violence disguised as pageantry. It is not the act of killing that defines bullfighting, but the deliberate normalization of killing. Every cheer reinforces the idea that cruelty can be noble if wrapped in spectacle. Every ticket sold declares that empathy is optional when pain is profitable.

The spectacle endures because it provides something addictive: the illusion of purity through destruction. It tells its audience that order can be restored through domination, that fear can be mastered through blood. This is the psychology of empire disguised as art, the fantasy that civilization needs savagery to feel alive.

And so, under the afternoon sun, in the echo of trumpets and applause, humanity congratulates itself for its refinement while watching an animal die slowly in the dust. What they call art is merely the elegance of indifference.

Tradition as excuse

Every society has its myths, and the most dangerous are those disguised as continuity. Bullfighting survives not because it has meaning, but because it has inertia. The word tradition has been inflated to the point of absurdity, serving as justification for everything that reason would otherwise condemn. What was once a custom of a particular time and place has been turned into a monument against moral evolution.

The defenders of bullfighting claim that it embodies the spirit of Spain, that to abolish it would be to betray the nation’s identity. This argument collapses under its own weight. Culture is not fossilized memory; it is the expression of a people in motion. A living culture changes, learns, and refines itself. To equate cruelty with identity is to declare that empathy is un-Spanish, and that compassion is foreign. A civilization that defines itself by pain does not preserve culture, it postpones maturity.

Tradition functions here as both shield and weapon. It shields those who profit from accountability, and it weaponizes nostalgia against reason. The past becomes a tool to silence the present. Any challenge to the ritual is dismissed as ignorance or intrusion, as though morality were a form of colonialism. Yet the real imposition is the one forced on every new generation born into inherited brutality. Children grow up being told that killing is culture, and that questioning it is betrayal. This is not tradition; it is indoctrination.

Bullfighting’s defenders insist that its abolition would destroy a “way of life”. But what kind of life depends on death for meaning? The persistence of this practice says less about history than about fear, fear of change, fear of irrelevance, fear that progress might reveal how hollow this spectacle truly is. The matador’s costume, so proudly paraded as heritage, is nothing more than an embroidered relic of denial.

The appeal to tradition also hides economic self-interest. Every ritual that becomes profitable turns into ideology. The moment a practice feeds an industry, morality is rewritten to protect income. Bullfighting has built an entire ecosystem around itself, breeders, promoters, journalists, costume makers, veterinarians, politicians, all claiming cultural legitimacy while defending personal benefit. To question the ethics of the event is to threaten their survival, so they rewrite cruelty as craftsmanship.

Even the language of bullfighting has been engineered to mask pain. Words like fiesta, art, and valor replace torture, blood, and fear. The ritual is wrapped in poetry to prevent confrontation with reality. The very vocabulary becomes complicit in deception. Through repetition, society learns to recite these euphemisms without reflection, until language itself stops being a tool for truth and becomes a mechanism for concealment.

In this way, tradition evolves into ideology, a system of excuses that disguises stagnation as heritage. When a country defends cruelty in the name of culture, it is not preserving its past but imprisoning its future. Progress does not erase identity; it refines it. To move beyond barbarism is not to forget who we are, but to decide who we wish to become.

What bullfighting reveals, therefore, is not love for the past but fear of the present. It is the fear of confronting a truth that every generation of humans eventually must face: that morality cannot remain static while knowledge expands. The same argument that once justified slavery or religious persecution now shelters the arena. The appeal to custom, like the red cape, distracts the public from the wound.

Tradition should be the continuity of wisdom, not the repetition of cruelty. Yet in Spain, it has become the opposite, a vocabulary of resistance to empathy. Those who defend bullfighting claim to protect culture, but what they are truly protecting is the right to feel nothing.

The business behind suffering

Cruelty endures because it pays. Behind the romantic mythology of the bullring lies an intricate network of subsidies, sponsorships, and political favors that transforms pain into profit. Bullfighting presents itself as an artistic ritual, but its real structure is that of a corporate machine, a system that monetizes death while laundering it through the language of culture.

Every bullfight begins long before the trumpet sounds. It begins in government budgets and regional grants, where public money flows quietly into private pockets. The industry is sustained not by public enthusiasm, attendance figures have been declining for years, but by institutional protection. Municipalities pay for arenas, local councils finance festivals, and the state allocates cultural funds that are later disguised as heritage preservation. In a nation with underfunded hospitals and precarious schools, taxpayers unknowingly finance the killing of animals for entertainment.

The justification for these subsidies is always the same: tourism. Supporters argue that bullfighting attracts visitors and generates income for local economies. The reality is far less grand. Most tourists attend once, out of curiosity or shock, not devotion. What truly sustains the industry are not ticket sales but political convenience. By defending bullfighting, politicians curry favor with landowners, rural elites, and media conglomerates who control both the farms and the coverage. The ring is not just an arena, it is an ecosystem of influence.

At the center of this ecosystem stands the breeding industry, which maintains thousands of bulls across vast estates owned by some of Spain’s most powerful families. These farms are presented as sanctuaries of tradition, yet they function as profit centers. Each animal represents investment, sponsorship, and status. The narrative of “saving the breed” is a marketing tactic: the fighting bull is not a natural species but a manufactured product, its existence justified only by its eventual death in the ring.

The media, too, profits from this choreography. National broadcasters treat bullfighting as spectacle and nostalgia, wrapping cruelty in patriotism. Television rights, advertising, and festival coverage maintain the illusion that public interest still exists. What the audience sees is not a dying industry but an edited memory, a version of Spain frozen in sepia tones, immune to moral scrutiny. Every broadcast is a performance not only for the crowd but for the nation itself.

Even education has been co-opted. In several regions, bullfighting receives funding as a “cultural and artistic discipline”, taught to children under the pretext of preserving heritage. Schools and foundations offer scholarships to aspiring bullfighters, transforming cruelty into career. This institutional complicity ensures continuity. By calling it art, the state ensures that barbarism reproduces itself with a diploma.

What makes this system resilient is its moral inversion. Those who oppose bullfighting are labeled as extremists, sentimentalists, or enemies of tradition, while those who profit from death are cast as defenders of culture. The debate is framed not as ethics versus violence, but as patriotism versus intrusion. In that distortion, the truth becomes irrelevant; only identity matters.

The business thrives because cruelty is profitable and accountability is abstract. The bull cannot speak, and the spectators choose not to. The silence between the two is where power consolidates itself. As long as the killing can be wrapped in ceremony, the blood will continue to circulate, through grants, through contracts, through applause.

Every coin spent on this ritual reinforces the same paradox: a nation that preaches compassion while financing suffering. The bullring, far from being a symbol of bravery, is a monument to hypocrisy, a place where profit is measured not in honor but in endurance.

The anatomy of torture

Violence becomes most acceptable when it is hidden in procedure. The cruelty of bullfighting does not unfold suddenly in the arena; it begins long before the crowd arrives, in the carefully orchestrated degradation of the animal. Every stage of the spectacle depends on preparation, and every preparation depends on pain. The bull’s suffering is not incidental, it is engineered.

Before the first trumpet sounds, the bull is confined in darkness for hours or even days. The purpose is disorientation. When the gates open and light floods in, confusion replaces instinct, ensuring slower reactions. Handlers wound the muscles of the neck and shoulders to weaken the animal’s ability to raise its head. Vaseline is smeared in its eyes to blur vision, and petroleum or alcohol applied to its legs to irritate movement. These acts are not myth, they are methods documented by veterinarians and whistleblowers who have left the industry in disgust.

Once in the ring, the animal is already defeated. The choreography that follows is the ritualized continuation of earlier torture. Picadors on horseback stab its neck with lances to lower its head, making it easier for the matador to perform. Banderilleros drive barbed sticks into the bull’s back to keep it bleeding and unstable. Each wound serves a technical purpose: to deform posture, to slow rhythm, to make pain visible enough to excite the audience but controlled enough to remain elegant. What the crowd calls bravery is the animal’s agony arranged in sequence.

The cruelty, however, does not end with the bull. The horses used by the picadores, old, half-blind animals chosen for their docility, are themselves victims of the same hypocrisy. They are covered with heavy wicker or leather breastplates, presented as protection against the bull’s horns. In reality, this armor conceals rather than prevents suffering. When the bull charges, the horse absorbs the full impact, its ribs crushed beneath the supposed shield. The coverings serve not to defend the animal, but to hide the damage from view, to spare the audience the sight of entrails spilling or bodies collapsing in terror. Many horses leave the ring maimed or die afterward, unseen, their silence part of the choreography of denial.

The cruelty is refined, not chaotic. That is what makes it so disturbing. Every movement is calibrated to preserve illusion, the illusion that this is a contest, that the matador risks his life against equal force. In truth, the only risk comes from miscalculation. The bull does not fight for glory; it reacts to terror. The matador, celebrated for precision, performs a death rehearsed thousands of times. The applause celebrates mastery, not mercy.

Behind the scenes, the hypocrisy deepens. The same veterinarians who are supposed to ensure animal welfare also sign the certificates that declare each bull “fit to fight”. Their role is bureaucratic complicity: to translate torture into paperwork. They know that the animal’s lungs are punctured, its blood pressure collapsing, its body unable to coordinate movement. Yet they stand silent because silence is profitable. Their expertise, once meant for care, becomes the final instrument of cruelty.

Understanding this cruelty also requires examining its psychology. Bullfighting is not sustained by sadism alone but by denial. Spectators convince themselves that the animal feels less pain, that its suffering is part of nature, that death in the arena is somehow noble. These rationalizations are inherited like folklore. They anesthetize conscience. The true skill of the bullring lies not in the matador’s hands but in the audience’s ability to look away.

The bull’s death is prolonged deliberately. It collapses not from the sword alone, but from exhaustion and internal bleeding. When the blade finally pierces the spinal cord, the act is presented as mercy. Trumpets sound, applause rises, and the animal is dragged out while still convulsing. What remains in the ring is a pattern of dust and blood that the audience mistakes for art.

Some spectators, confronted with the horror, will argue that death is part of nature, that animals kill each other too. The comparison is false. Nature kills to survive; humanity kills to entertain. That distinction marks the line between instinct and civilization. To cross it willingly is not courage, it is regression.

Bullfighting’s defenders call it “the art of death”. In truth, it is the art of concealment. It transforms slow agony into spectacle and packages barbarism as beauty. The choreography of pain becomes so polished that even cruelty appears disciplined. And that is the final perversion: when suffering becomes graceful, empathy becomes obsolete.

The sacred myth of the bullfighter

Every system of cruelty requires a hero. Bullfighting would not endure if it were presented for what it is, a ritual of domination, but it survives by elevating its perpetrator into legend. The matador is not merely the performer; he is the fiction through which the public redeems its guilt. Draped in gold and ritual, he becomes the human face of an inhuman act, the supposed embodiment of bravery and beauty in the face of danger.

The myth was not born spontaneously. It was engineered. Over centuries, literature, painting, and cinema have sculpted the figure of the bullfighter into something sacred. Writers from Hemingway to García Lorca romanticized the matador as the artist of death, transforming slaughter into metaphor. Pain became poetry; cruelty became charisma. A man who kills became a symbol of grace. The myth replaced reality, and the killer became the victim of destiny rather than its agent.

In Spain, the matador occupies a paradoxical space between celebrity and saint. He is portrayed as a national symbol, a man of the people who transcends his origins through courage. But behind this mythology lies class theater. The majority of bullfighters come from poor families who see the arena as a ladder to fame and wealth. They risk their lives not for art or honor but for survival. The spectacle markets their ambition as nobility, disguising desperation as devotion.

The cult of the bullfighter is not about bravery; it is about hierarchy. The matador’s movements imitate control, the control of life over death, of order over chaos. Each strike reaffirms a fantasy that humanity can master nature through ritual. In truth, the ritual serves to remind the crowd that power belongs to those who can make others suffer without consequence. It is a moral theater where domination is aestheticized into elegance.

Religious imagery reinforces this narrative. The matador’s posture, arms outstretched, mirrors crucifixion iconography. The arena becomes a cathedral of violence, its sand sanctified by repetition. When the bull kneels and collapses, the act is received as transcendence, not termination. The crowd rises in reverence, mistaking spectacle for spirituality. In this setting, compassion becomes heresy.

The media, predictably, amplifies the myth. Newspapers still print the names of famous matadors as if announcing royalty, while television anchors describe their injuries with the solemnity reserved for martyrs. The narrative of sacrifice persists: the bullfighter does not inflict death; he “faces” it. This inversion transforms cruelty into courage and disguises the aggressor as a victim. The spectacle depends on this linguistic acrobatics, without it, the applause would sound like complicity.

Education perpetuates the deception. Young bullfighters are taught not only technique but mythology. They learn to internalize the rhetoric of art, destiny, and honor, to speak of their work as heritage, not industry. The system ensures that even those who suffer within it will defend it, mistaking indoctrination for vocation. They are trained to believe that death, if it comes, will sanctify them.

The myth of the bullfighter reveals less about courage than about collective denial. The matador stands as a mirror in which society sees not the animal’s suffering but its own desire for grandeur. The applause is not for the kill but for the illusion of mastery. In that illusion lies the true function of the ritual: to convince the powerless that violence can still be beautiful when performed by the powerful.

When the crowd cheers the matador, it is not celebrating bravery but exorcising conscience. The ritual ends not with victory, but with forgetting. And that forgetting, polished into legend, is what keeps the blood flowing, generation after generation.

Barbarism as identity

Every nation carries a myth about itself, a story it tells to justify its peculiarities. In Spain, that myth is built around pride. Pride in history, in struggle, in resilience. But pride, when left unchecked, becomes blindness, and blindness turns cruelty into virtue. The persistence of bullfighting is not simply a matter of tradition; it is an expression of how a country has confused pain with personality.

The rhetoric surrounding the bullring often invokes identity as if it were a sacred inheritance. Defenders speak of “Spanish essence”, of bravery and passion, of the supposed authenticity of suffering. In this narrative, compassion is cast as weakness, and the rejection of cruelty as foreign interference. By opposing bullfighting, one is accused not of defending animals, but of betraying the nation. This moral inversion reveals the depth of the confusion: patriotism has been rewritten to include indifference.

The transformation of barbarism into identity was not accidental, it was cultivated. For centuries, political and religious authorities have used bullfighting as a symbol of endurance, a metaphor for the Spanish spirit under adversity. Dictators embraced it to portray unity; elites embraced it to maintain control. Franco understood this power well: by sanctifying the spectacle, he turned it into a patriotic duty. The arena became a microcosm of obedience, where blood reaffirmed order and the crowd learned to applaud hierarchy.

This mentality still lingers. To challenge bullfighting today is to challenge the remnants of an authoritarian past disguised as folklore. Its defenders often speak in the vocabulary of defiance, yet what they protect is submission, the submission of empathy to pride, of progress to nostalgia. They claim to resist “foreign moralism”, as if decency were a colonial export. The result is a cultural echo chamber where cruelty becomes self-congratulation.

The contradiction is stark: a modern democracy that funds torture in the name of heritage. Spain, a country that prides itself on its art, architecture, and literature, continues to defend a spectacle that undermines all of them. This is not a matter of opinion but of coherence. The same society that mourns for refugees, campaigns for animal shelters, and celebrates global humanitarian causes turns into a cheering mob the moment the trumpet sounds. Moral progress stops at the arena gate.

The identification of bullfighting with national character also reveals how collective trauma perpetuates itself. For generations, Spain has been taught to romanticize pain, to see endurance as beauty and suffering as destiny. This is why the spectacle resonates so deeply: it mirrors a psychological inheritance of submission to suffering. The bull becomes the embodiment of resistance, and by killing it, the matador reasserts control over chaos. The entire performance is a metaphor for the management of collective fear.

But identity built on cruelty is not strength; it is confession. It admits that without pain, a culture feels empty. The defenders of bullfighting often claim that those who oppose it “do not understand Spain”. Yet to understand Spain fully is precisely to recognize how deeply this contradiction runs, to see a country that produces poets and painters of profound empathy yet cannot detach its self-image from the sight of blood.

National identity, when reduced to spectacle, becomes propaganda. A mature culture does not cling to what degrades it; it transforms it. The greatness of a people lies not in how long it can preserve its barbarism, but in how bravely it can abandon it. Until Spain confronts this truth, bullfighting will remain a mirror, not of glory, but of guilt.

The mirror of civilization

No cruelty exists in isolation. Every society invents its own version of the bullring, a space where pain is turned into ritual and spectators learn to confuse participation with innocence. Bullfighting endures not because Spain is uniquely barbaric, but because it exposes something universal: the human tendency to aestheticize violence when it serves identity, profit, or pride. The arena is a metaphor that extends far beyond its sand.

Civilization congratulates itself on refinement, yet continues to build spectacles of domination. We no longer gather in amphitheaters to watch lions devour captives, but we still applaud humiliation when it is framed as entertainment. The same impulse that cheers the matador fuels the digital mob, the political rally, the viral outrage. Cruelty has changed costume but not purpose, it still unites the crowd through shared indifference.

Modernity’s cruelty is sanitized. We do not see the slaughterhouse, the factory farm, or the laboratory. We simply consume the results. The violence is hidden by distance and language, just as the bull’s agony is hidden behind music and costume. This is the essence of civilization’s hypocrisy: the capacity to inflict suffering while maintaining moral comfort. Bullfighting only makes visible what the rest of the world performs invisibly.

This is why the debate around the bullring transcends national borders. It is not about Spain alone; it is about the continuity of human denial. Every time a society calls cruelty “culture”, it reveals its fear of empathy. Compassion threatens hierarchy, it demands equality between the strong and the vulnerable. The spectacle survives because it reassures the audience that domination is natural, that power can still be theatrical without consequence.

Some will argue that the modern world has evolved beyond such displays. Yet the instinct persists, disguised by technology and ideology. Reality shows humiliate participants for amusement, social networks feed on outrage, and political discourse rewards aggression over reason. The crowd has simply traded the bull for the human subject. What remains unchanged is the thrill of control, the pleasure of watching someone else’s pain unfold safely behind a screen.

The moral distance that allows this behavior is the same that sustains the bullring. The closer we are to suffering, the more effort we make to rename it. We call it “tradition”, “competition”, “content”. We invent narratives to soften what our conscience cannot endure. The language of civilization, refined and rational, becomes a new form of anesthesia.

In that sense, the bullfight is not an anachronism but a mirror. It reflects the truth that progress has been more technical than ethical. We have built machines that can calculate compassion, but we still fail to feel it. The crowd that cheers the matador is no different from the audience that celebrates digital humiliation: both seek release through the suffering of another.

The challenge, then, is not to condemn Spain’s cruelty but to recognize our own. The arena is a metaphor for every system that survives through collective detachment. The lesson of bullfighting is not about tradition or nationhood, it is about the human capacity to normalize what should never be normal.

Civilization is not tested by its monuments or achievements, but by how it treats what cannot defend itself. And by that measure, we are still standing in the sand, applauding death.

Divine justice

There are moments when cruelty collapses under its own weight. When the ritual fails, when the choreography breaks, when the applause turns into shock, truth enters the arena. The instant the bull survives, resists, and kills, something ancient and uncontrollable reawakens: the sense that nature, though wounded, still remembers balance.

Those who witness it often describe it as tragedy. The commentators speak of misfortune, of fate betrayed, of the fallen hero. But what truly falls in that moment is illusion. For once, the spectacle ceases to function. The animal that was meant to die refuses its role, and the order of domination reverses itself. What the crowd calls accident is, in moral terms, correction. The oppressor meets his creation, and the myth collapses beneath its own script.

It is easy to condemn such thoughts as vindictive. Yet there is a difference between vengeance and justice. The bull does not kill out of malice, it kills out of instinct. Its act is not moral, but natural, and precisely because of that, it restores what the human ritual had stolen: authenticity. The arena, built for artifice, suddenly hosts truth. The moment the bull wins, cruelty confronts itself.

This reversal is what makes the sight so powerful. For a brief second, the hierarchy dissolves. The matador, once adored, becomes mortal again, vulnerable, terrified, exposed. The audience, accustomed to control, watches its own complicity unravel. The blood on the sand no longer belongs to the animal but to the human who demanded it. It is not triumph that fills the air, but silence.

That silence carries the weight of recognition. The crowd sees what it has denied: that suffering cannot be aestheticized forever, that even the most rehearsed cruelty contains a seed of rebellion. The bull’s survival is not a victory of strength, but of reality. It reminds everyone present that nature does not obey myth, and that dignity, once violated, will find its way back through any opening, even if that opening is death.

To call this divine justice is not to invoke religion, but proportion. It is the brief restoration of equilibrium in a world that has distorted it. The bull’s triumph, however fleeting, is not savagery, it is revelation. It reminds us that no system of cruelty is total, that life resists its own exploitation. The spectacle, built to affirm human superiority, momentarily becomes an altar of humility.

In those rare moments when the bullfighter falls, the arena ceases to be theater and becomes confession. Every applause ever given, every subsidy ever granted, every justification ever repeated collapses into that one instant of clarity: what we call culture is often the refined persistence of barbarism.

I do not celebrate death, but I cannot mourn the death of a killer. When the bull wins, the world briefly makes sense. Cruelty is answered by consequence, arrogance by gravity. It is not joy that follows, but relief, the faint, guilty recognition that for once, justice did not need a law.

Beyond blood and applause

Civilization measures itself not by its achievements, but by what it refuses to justify. The endurance of bullfighting in Spain is not a reflection of national pride, but of moral stagnation. It reveals how easily a society can mistake habit for heritage and cruelty for character. What should have become a historical footnote has instead been elevated into identity, a monument to the power of denial.

The defense of this spectacle has always relied on two illusions: that suffering can be noble, and that art redeems violence. Both are false. There is no nobility in domination, no poetry in pain. The notion that the bull’s death carries aesthetic meaning is a human invention designed to conceal cowardice. No costume, ritual, or tradition can disguise the truth that culture ends where cruelty begins.

Spain is not defined by this brutality, it is diminished by it. The nation that produced Goya, who painted horror with compassion, and Cervantes, who wrote of dignity amid madness, cannot claim enlightenment while funding the public torture of animals. To protect bullfighting as “heritage” is to betray the very culture it pretends to defend. A country’s greatness is measured not by what it preserves, but by what it outgrows.

But this is not merely a Spanish failure. It is a mirror held up to humanity’s ongoing hypocrisy. We denounce cruelty yet consume it in subtler forms every day, through what we watch, what we buy, and what we ignore. The bullring is only the most visible symptom of a deeper condition: the normalization of suffering for pleasure. The problem is not the spectacle itself, but the comfort with which we witness it.

There will come a time when bullfighting, like slavery or public execution, will be remembered with disbelief. Future generations will ask how we could have called such acts culture, how we could have applauded suffering and still claimed civilization. The answer will not be found in politics or law, but in conscience. Cruelty survives where empathy is optional.

If there is redemption to be found, it lies in the capacity to change, not as a concession to modernity, but as a moral necessity. The end of bullfighting will not erase Spanish culture; it will elevate it. True heritage does not fear compassion, it thrives on it. Every step away from brutality is a step toward coherence, toward becoming what civilization claims to be.

When the final arena closes and the last trumpet falls silent, Spain will not lose its soul; it will finally reclaim it. The applause will fade, but what remains will be something far more enduring than spectacle: the quiet dignity of a culture that chose empathy over blood.