Take a look at this article – over the weekend a guy was killed running with the bulls just a few miles south of my fair city.
Here’s a fun fact – this bull running remains prevalent throughout Spain. Nope, not just in Pamplona, though that town has the festival most widely known by outsiders.
(I’m thinking it’s because it’s just so fun to say… “Pamplona… Pam-plo-na”. If your mind immediately goes to Dennis Miller saying “Uma… U-ma… U-ma”, then your official diagnosis is Old, and I don’t care what your new wife says, grandpa, that’s what you pay her for! But I digress.)
Yep, in September, right here in Peniscola, we had the Virgin of the Hermitage Festival, where various battles between Christians and Muslims are fought and we’re treated to “heifers on the beach”. (‘Course, I didn’t go, because I was (and remain) extremely COVID paranoid. So close to the excitement, yet so far away. Sigh.)
Often, the running scared through narrow village streets is only the first terror for the bulls that day. They may then be participants in the bull fight.
A 2020 poll suggests that 47% of Spaniards would ban this long-held cultural festivity, while only 19% believes bull running should continue.