Melancholy in Catalonia as Barcelona holds final bullfight

Sep 26, 2011, 11:43 GMT

Madrid - Spanish commentators Monday gave a melancholic farewell to bullfighting after the last ever fight was held in Barcelona.

The Sunday evening emotional bullfight in Spain's second-largest city drew about 20,000 people in the Monumental bullring, which is nearly a century old.

All of the wealthy north-eastern region of Catalonia will end bullfights at the beginning of 2012 after the regional parliament approved a ban to that effect in July last year.

The last bullfight of the Monumental turned into a tribute to Spain's 'national fiesta,' drawing an unusually large crowd.

It featured the star bullfighter Jose Tomas, but the hero of the evening was Serafin Marin, who killed the last of the six bulls in the bullfight.

Marin then kissed the sand floor of the bullring in tears, in an 'intense and mysterious moment filled with emotion and melancholic sadness,' bullfighting critic Antonio Lorca wrote Monday in the daily El Pais.

The bullfighters were later carried shoulder high into the streets, while the crowd called for 'freedom' to stage bullfights and scuffled with animal rights activists.

Catalonia has become the first region on the Spanish mainland to outlaw bullfights, in a move which is seen by many as heralding a general decline of the fiesta in Spain.

Catalonia does not only have a strong animal rights movement, but some Catalan separatists also see bullfights as an expression of Spanishness.

Several newspaper editorials on Monday criticized the ban. The conservative daily El Mundo described it as an 'outrage to freedom,' expressing hope that it could be reversed by the opposition conservative People's Party, which is expected to win the Spanish parliamentary elections on November 20.

The Catalan daily Periodico conceded that bullfights were 'sentenced and diagnosed with natural death' in Catalonia, where few people went to see them.

However, there should have been other priorities in a country suffering from the consequences of a deep economic crisis, the daily argued.

Yet the Catalan parliament had taken its decision in a highly democratic fashion, ecologist Juan Lopez de Uralde wrote in El Pais.

The ban was based on a citizens' initiative that was backed by tens of thousands of signatures.

'The days of bullfights are counted, like those of other spectacles in which entertainment is based on the mistreatment of a living being,' Lopez de Uralde said.

The future of the Monumental - a Barcelona landmark - is not yet known.