Category Archives: Spain

Mad Bulls and Englishmen by Giles Coren in The Times

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This article of Giles Coren’s was originally published in The Times magazine on Boxing Day ’09 where it is still available along with Dominic Elliot’s film of our day bullfighting here. All photos are by Nicolás Haro.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, the English bullfighter, takes on a ‘vaquilla’ of the Saltillo breed. Inset: with Giles Coren, attending a bullfight in Seville.

Writers and travellers have long been drawn to the drama and romance of the bullfight. Giles Coren is no exception, so when he was contacted out of the blue by the younger brother of his dead best friend, now training to be a bullfighter in Spain, Giles was intrigued. Here he describes his journey into a unique culture of noblemen, peasants and swindlers, all driven by deadly serious dreams of death and glory

I am in a bullring. Not in the seats, in the ring. On the sand. From the relative safety of a wooden barrier with a small room behind it, built into the stone wall, I have seen four vaquillas, young cows, “caped” by one of Spain’s most famous matadors, the son of the first post-Franco prime minister of Spain, Adolfo Suárez Illana, and by Alexander Fiske-Harrison, the younger brother of my best friend at school, who died in an accident the year we left, three months before his 19th birthday. Continue reading →

The matador Juan José Padilla, in his own words – #fuerzapadilla

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Juan José Padilla with a Miura bull, Feria de Abril, Seville 2010 (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

For those that missed the news story (here) Spain’s bravest matador, Juan José Padilla – a friend of mine and major character in my recent book Into The Arena – was terribly gored a fortnight ago. In this interview he speaks of his recovery. A translation of some of his words is below…

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

They know that this is my life and they know that this is my profession, and they know that I am going to fight, I will give my utmost to be able to face bulls again, because that is what makes me happy.

And because the bull has given me everything. The bull has given me magnificent triumphs, I have been the victor of the greatest fairs in Spain, and the fact that a bull is going to give me injuries does not meant that I am going to feel any bitterness towards him. I will return to face the bulls.

In the words of Adolfo Suárez Illana this morning, who is with him, “He is getting better little by little. But he is getting there…”

#fuerzapadilla

Juan José Padilla and I in the ring together in March ’09 (Photo: Paloma de Gaytan Ayala)

José Tomás: And The Myth Was Made Flesh Once More

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When perhaps the greatest matador in history, José Tomás, returned to the ring from his inexplicable five-year retirement in 2007, the Spanish press ran with the headline, “And The Myth Was Made Flesh.” At that time, I had never seen him bullfight, and thought it pure journalistic hyperbole. Since then I have and have chosen this headline myself as a result. The Agence-France Presse released this report on his astonishing re-emergence from near-death and appalling injury:

Jose Tomas makes triumphant comeback to bullring in Spain

VALENCIA, Spain — Acclaimed Spanish bullfighter Jose Tomas made a triumphant comeback to the bullring Saturday, receiving a standing ovation more than a year after a bloody goring in Mexico that almost killed him. The 35-year-old, wearing a purple and gold outfit, offered his first bull of the night, a 502-kilogramme beast, to the doctors who had helped him recover. He was less successful with his second bull, a 556-kilo four-and-a-half-year-old, but delighted the sell-out crowd of 11,000, many of whom had traveled from overseas to see the spectacle in the eastern city of Valencia. Tomas was seriously gored and almost died in a bullfight April 24 last year in Aguasclientes, Mexico. A 470-kilo (1,000-pound) bull named Navegante, his second bull of the evening, thrust its horn into the muscle of Tomas’s left thigh, puncturing the artery and causing the bullfighter to lose about half of his blood. In September he will be able to fight at Barcelona’s Monumental ring in what may be the last La Merced festival before a bullfighting ban in the Catalonia region comes into force next year. Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved

In celebration of this return, I have put below my description of what I believe to Tomás’s greatest corrida de toros, in Jerez de la Frontera in 2009, where he fought alongside the matadors El Cid, who featured in my Prospect magazine article that led to my becoming a bullfighter (available here), and my great friend Juan José Padilla (whom you can read more about in my The Pamplona Post article here).
Continue reading →

Padilla in The Pamplona Post

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It may seem churlish as The Last Arena receives its 50.000th visitor to send them to The Pamplona Post, but since the extract from my book Into The Arena – with a host of photographs I couldn’t fit in the book by Nicolás Haro – is all about Pamplona’s favourite matador, Juan José Padilla, I am afraid there was no way around. Please click on the masthead below:

Moving blog for Pamplona

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Running in Pamplona ’09 – me circled right

For the festivities of Pamplona 2011, I will be moving blog to The Pamplona Post, an informal, constantly updated multimedia avalanche on the madness of bullrunning, bullfighting, drinking and everything else one gets up to in the streets of the capital of Navarre…
Join me there by clicking on the masthead below:

The run up to Pamplona…

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Me, right, running with the bulls in Pamplona. (Look for the horn behind the head of the man falling to my right.)

As I dig out my running clothes for the 320th annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, I am pleased to see the chapter where I described running there in 2009 in my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, serialised in The Independent On Sunday today. This year, on the 50th anniverary of Ernest Hemingway’s death, I go to meet with John Hemingway, grandson of the man who made the town the by-word for “grace under pressure” and drunken revelry with bulls attached.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison: ‘How I risked my life in the Pamplona bull run’

Ernest Hemingway made the Pamplona bull run famous. To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, the acclaimed British writer Alexander Fiske-Harrison relives the day he ran with Pamplona’s bulls…

Read on here..

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alexander-fiskeharrison-how-i-risked-my-life-in-the-pamplona-bull-run-2301797.html

Or just buy the book here…

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Into-Arena-World-Spanish-Bullfight/dp/1846683351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302790004&sr=8-1

An Englishman in Miura country

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Author with a Miura (Photo: Pepe Sánchez)

As I train with my Maestro, to kill a single bull so I can write the most complete book on bullfighting possible (although abandoning my reputation for neutrality as a writer by getting into the arena) remarkable things happen. It is well known in the bullfighting world that no photography is allowed in the unique rectangular ‘plaza’ of Zahariche, the ranch where the world famous Miura bulls are bred, but that rule was broken for a demonstration for a select group of guests – including my friend Enrique Moreno de la Cova who breeds the equally historic Saltillo bulls. This piece of picture reportage by the photographer Pepe Sánchez can be found in the article ‘An Englishman in Zahariche’ on the website of Spain’s most popular bullfighting programme, Toros para Todos, ‘Bulls for All’, to see it click here. The first images are of Pepe Luis Vázquez, a notable former matador and son of an even greater one. Then comes my Maestro, Eduardo Dávila Miura, a recently retired matador and nephew of the house of Miura. Then the aficionado práctico Pepe González Barba. Followed by myself.

Here is what Hemingway had to say about Miura back in the 1930s.

“These bulls must be fought and killed as rapidly as possible with the minimum of exposure by the man, for they learn more rapidly than the fight ordinarily progresses and become exaggeratedly difficult to work with and kill.

Bulls of this sort are the old caste of fighting bulls raised by the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla”

Two of the sons of those sons are below, and their daughter’s son as well…

Miuras – Eduardo Miura, AFH, Antonio Miura, and the matador Eduardo Dávila Miura in the finca ‘Zahariche’ in 2010 (Photo: Lucy Gould)

My interview with Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez in ‘The Times’.

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Cayetano Rivera Ordoñez (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

Published in the magazine of yesterday’s edition of the Sunday Times is my interview with the extremely simpatico and gifted matador, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez. On the day of his corrida in Sanlucar de Barrameda, my photographer Nicolás Haro and I went to meet him in his hotel where we spoke for a couple of hours from which these words are extracted.

A Life in the Day: The lord of the bullring

The matador Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, 32, on his love-hate relationship with the bull

Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Published: 26 July 200

I usually arrive in a town the night before the fight. The day I fight, I don’t put on the alarm clock. It is important not to be tired. Depending on the time, I either get breakfast or I have an early lunch. I cannot eat for four or five hours before the fight, in case I have to have surgery. Matadors have to deal with those little matters. Usually I don’t go out from the hotel room. I’m in my own world, concentrating for the afternoon. I lie back, relax, talk to friends, watch some TV, listen to some music: flamenco, rock’n’roll, depending on how I feel.

When I am training at my family’s house in Ronda, near Malaga, I usually wake up around 9. I go to the gym for a couple of hours, then I practise my moves without the bull at home, what we call toreo de salon, for two hours. We also spend a long time thinking about the bull, because you have to read it: its movements, its speed, the height of its horns when it charges. The bull tells you what you are able to do and what you shouldn’t try, and you have to improvise on this in real time. Continue reading →