A bloody fight to the death

In the closing moments of a bullfight, the matador extends his arm and aims his sword at the wavering, maddened beast before him. He lowers his cape and watches the bull's head dip to expose the vulnerable spot behind the shoulders, then he runs to plunge the blade to the hilt. The bloodied animal drops to the ground and the matador turns to acknowledge the cheering crowds.

In the closing moments of a bullfight, the matador extends his arm and aims his sword at the wavering, maddened beast before him. He lowers his cape and watches the bull's head dip to expose the vulnerable spot behind the shoulders, then he runs to plunge the blade to the hilt. The bloodied animal drops to the ground and the matador turns to acknowledge the cheering crowds.

This is the kill - the climax of the bullfighter's art. Spaniards call it the moment of truth, when a man (occasionally a woman) confronts and overcomes his fear of death. It is the crowning horror of a cruel and barbarous spectacle. More often than not, the sword bounces off the bull's spine and skips across the sand, and the matador must try again as the crowd roar their contempt and hurl cushions. If he botches further attempts, he takes a sword with a cross at the end and stabs the bull's head. If the animal still moves, an aide dispatches it with a dagger to the brain - a squalid operation loathed by aficionados and opponents alike.

It is hard to imagine the bullfight without the kill. Hemingway, in his encyclopedic celebration of taurine matters, Death in the Afternoon, wrestles briefly with the moral dilemma, but concludes with pragmatic crispness: "My own standpoint is quite simple: I could see the bull had to be killed to make the bullfight."

Sixty-five years on, in a development that would have astounded Hemingway, a campaign is growing in Spain to take the kill out of the corrida; to remove the bull from public view in its last moments of agony. Those seeking to overthrow centuries - perhaps millennia - of tradition want to abolish the public kill as the first step towards a total ban on bullfights.

Unsurprisingly, the bullfighting industry is fighting back against this assault upon la fiesta nacional, whose doings Spanish newspapers detail as lovingly as La Liga de Fútbol - but in pages devoted to culture, not sport.

Catalans, who generally consider themselves more modern and progressive than the rest of Spain on most things, are at the forefront of this anti-bullfight campaign. Catalan nationalists and separatists are among the keenest to distance themselves from a tradition some consider Spanish, not Catalan. Late last month, Oriol Amorós, regional MP for the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left, part of Catalunya's ruling coalition, proposed an amendment to the region's animal protection law. He sought to ban bullfights and spectacles "that include the death of the animal and the application of the lance, the darts [banderillas] and the sword". The tradition must evolve, Amorós said, so that the bull is not killed. Other MPs greeted the proposal sympathetically, complaining only that Amorós hogged the limelight by going it alone.

The proposal followed an historic declaration against bullfighting made by Barcelona city council on 6 April. That declaration was symbolic, since the regional government, not the city, rules the bullrings. Nonetheless, Spain's animal rights activists welcomed the decision as a huge breakthrough and proof that, after years of campaigning, the politicians were finally listening to their message. The Republican Left deputy mayor, Jordi Portabella, wrote in Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper that day: "The bull... has a nervous system similar to that of human beings, capable of dreaming and suffering. It is peaceful, like the cow or ox, which flees from aggression and danger."

Barcelona's two great bullrings are rarely full, and Catalans say, with a hint of disdain, that the most fervent supporters are immigrants from poorer parts of the country. Campaigners want Catalonia to lead a movement to drive bullfighting from Spain. The region has long been concerned about the blood and violence displayed in the plaza de toros. In 1988, the Catalan government banned unaccompanied children under 14 from the bullring and extended the ban in 2003 to all under-14s. Madrid has started to listen. In October, MPs insisted Spanish television herald broadcast bullfights with warnings of the likelihood of violent images unsuitable for children under 13. Television companies are expected to heed recent British protests against satellite broadcasts at children's hour and ban televised bullfights before 8pm.

Protests are not new. Eye-catching gestures by British or American campaigners have long enlivened the Spanish bullfighting scene. Vicki Moore, the campaigner from Merseyside, was nearly gored to death when she protested at a bull festival in 1995 (she later died of her injuries). Last July, female protesters stripped to their underwear to stage a mock counter-run during the bull-running in Pamplona, a week-long festival immortalised in Hemingway's 1927 novel Fiesta: the Sun Also Rises.

In Hemingway's day, Pamplona's bull run involved a four-minute burst of bravado by local boys who ran alongside bulls destined for death that afternoon, as they galloped through the streets from corral to bullring. The festival exploded into Spain's most famous international tourist happening, when every year drunken blokes, who know nothing of bulls, psyche themselves into a perilous adrenalin rush to be gored, or killed.

Spain's bulls go far back. There used to be earnest debate over whether bullfighting was brought to Spain by the Romans or the Moors. Historians now think the roots go further back still, to Minoan sports, ancient agrarian rites and the cult of the ancient bull-god Mithras. But there is an historic tension between bullfighting's popular roots favoured across northern Spain - most famously in Pamplona, but repeated throughout Navarra, Castilla and the Basque country - and its southern, mainly Andalusian, counterpart. The elitist, aristocratic refinement and consecration of the taurine art was launched by the matador Francisco Romero, an 18th century shoemaker from the Andaluz town of Ronda, and evolved into today's corrida. The best bulls are bred on Andalusia's sprawling estates, established when Hispania was an agreeable outpost of the Roman empire, famed for its olives and dancing girls. Great bull-breeding, landed families dominate Andalus society, which is still semi-feudal with legions of day labourers who can find work only at harvest time. Most would-be toreros are poor boys from modest homes, but the business is run by millionaires.

Among them are the cigar-chomping, hard-nosed entrepreneurs of the National Association of Organisers of Taurine Spectacles, which issued a blistering condemnation of the Catalans' initiative as "an explicit attempt to extinguish the greater part of our Mediterranean cultural heritage". "Now is the moment to form a special agreement among all national parties committed to defend the fiesta," the association said last month, and urged journalists and aficionados to band together to campaign for "the inalienable right to freedom of expression".

Any aficionado will tell you that the fighting bull is bred for its role - it lives for five years like a pasha in fresh air and open pasture, and dies with more dignity in the ring than a cow bred for beef or a pig bred for pork dies in an industrial slaughterhouse. You may see gratuitous cruelty and an unhealthy obsession with blood and death, but they see honour, art and heroism - what they call "cojones" (balls).

Bullfighting is, nonetheless, in decline and has been for decades. Gone is the time when the bullfight was Spain's only popular entertainment. Now football is a far greater national passion. You have only to read the news reports, often summed up in a single-word headline: "Frustration", "disaster", "boredom" and "useless" were some verdicts on dreary afternoons last season in the top bullrings of Seville and Madrid.

The problem is not the matadors. Talented, ambitious youngsters still blaze into this competitive world. It's the bulls. They're hopeless. I once accompanied my Irish friend Pamela O'Malley to Madrid's Las Ventas bullring, where she has held a season ticket for decades. The old-timers who were sat with us on the granite benches shouted bitterly as they spat the husks from their sunflower seeds - "miau, miau" (pussycat) - as bulls flopped to their knees at the first quiver of a cape.

"These days, the bulls have their bravery bred out of them," O'Malley says. "It's easier to breed them docile; it's what everyone in the business wants." Joaquín Vidal, the late bullfight correspondent for El Pais newspaper, broke the national conspiracy of silence about bullfighting fraud and became something of a hero, even for those who cared nothing for bulls. Vidal neither befriended bullfighters, managers and the rest, nor bent to pressures or threats. "The taurine world is corrupt and closed, a rotten business," he told me at a small village bullfight outside Madrid one freezing spring afternoon. Drugging or horn-shaving were almost universal, he said, as we watched bull after bull stagger about, barely able to stand. Such abuses were widespread, he said. "Everyone knows; no one tells." This is a hidebound macho world. One of the few women to reach the bullfighting's highest level was Cristina Sanchez, a slender hairdresser from a modest Madrid suburb. She achieved what tens of thousands of aspiring males fail to do and became a fully fledged matador in 1996. She reached the top of her profession, and was carried shoulder high from Las Ventas - the La Scala of bullfighting.

"I thought it would become easier and all my years of struggling would pay off," she says, "but to my surprise it became more difficult." She found herself excluded from the main festivals, destined to trail the B-circuit of village fiestas. One enthusiast confided to me the truth her colleagues evidently never told her: "If a top bullfighter performs below par and is outshone that afternoon by another fighter, then it's painful but you accept it. But not if it's a woman. No bullfighter can accept being outperformed by a woman." Sanchez showed she had the skill to match the best, only to find that they refused to accept her in case she did better. The men never admitted her into their world and she retired three years later.

Bullfighting may have been able to close ranks to women, but the animal rights activists are pertinacious. Aficionados agree with Hemingway that a bullfight without the kill is unthinkable. But celebrations with bulls are so deeply entrenched in Spanish culture it seems unlikely that the bullfight will fade out altogether. Animal rights campaigners have pioneered efforts to soften the corrida's bloodier edge, in parts of the country at least, but it will be a long time until they can administer the final coup de grâce.

Elizabeth Nash's book "Seville: A Cultural and Literary History" is published shortly by Signal

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