I am writing this from a café just a stone’s throw from Las Ventas, where the smell of stale Ducados tobacco and strong coffee hangs in the air. It is the off-season now, and the great plaza stands silent (while preparing next season of Madrid Bullfighting), a cathedral of brick and ceramic awaiting the spring. But for those of us who have spent our lives covering the corrida, the ghosts are always present.

To my American friends, the bullfight is often a paradox—a spectacle of color and tragedy that is difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities. You see the blood; we see the ritual. And to understand why this tradition survives in the hearts of so many Spaniards, despite the fierce and valid opposition it faces today, one must look to the man who understood the soul of Spain better than anyone: the poet Federico García Lorca.

 

The "Cultured Festival"

 

Many in the English-speaking world know Lorca for his plays like Blood Wedding or his surreal poetry in New York. But here in the circles of ranchers and matadors, we know him as one of our own.

Lorca was not a casual observer. He was a true aficionado. He famously declared the bullfight to be "the greatest poetic and vital wealth of Spain."

For Lorca, the bullring wasn’t a slaughterhouse; it was a temple. He argued that the corrida was the only place in the modern world where death is surrounded by dazzling beauty. In a conversation I once had with an old banderillero from Seville, he told me, "Don Federico didn't watch the fight to see an animal die. He watched to see a man live on the edge of the abyss."

"The bullfight is the only art where the artist is in danger of death and where the degree of brilliance in the execution depends on that danger." — Federico García Lorca

 

The Theory of Duende

 

To explain Lorca’s obsession to a North American audience, I must introduce you to a word that has no direct translation: Duende.

Lorca lectured extensively on this. Duende is not skill, and it is not technique. It is a dark, mysterious power that rises from the feet up through the body. It is the moment when a singer’s voice breaks with raw emotion, or when a bullfighter slows time, moving the cape inches from the horns with a sadness and elegance that makes the crowd weep.

Lorca believed the bullfight was a constant struggle with Duende. It is the dance between Eros (desire) and Thanatos (death). For the poet, the bull was not a victim, but a mythological partner—a dark angel essential for the tragedy to unfold.

 

A Lament for a Friend

 

The poet’s passion was cemented in history by personal tragedy. Lorca was close friends with Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a brave, intellectual matador—a man who wrote plays and flew airplanes, a true Renaissance man in a suit of lights.

When Sánchez Mejías was gored and died in the ring in Manzanares in 1934, Lorca was devastated. His grief produced what is arguably the greatest poem in the Spanish language and certainly the most famous piece of bullfighting literature: Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.

The refrain, "At five in the afternoon" (A las cinco de la tarde), beats like a funeral drum. It captures the precise moment when the sun begins to lower, the trumpet sounds, and destiny arrives. If you want to understand the gravity of what happens in the ring, you must read that poem. It strips away the gold and the applause, leaving only the stark reality of mortality.

 

The Modern Dilemma

 

I will be honest with you. The world has changed since Lorca was executed at the start of our Civil War. Today, the ethical arguments against bullfighting are loud and resonant. Animal rights advocates view the "Fiesta" as an archaic cruelty that has no place in the 21st century. I hear these arguments, and as a journalist, I must report them faithfully. There is blood, there is suffering, and for the uninitiated, it can be repulsive.

However, those who wish to ban the bulls often miss what Lorca saw. They see the violence, but they miss the liturgy. Lorca saw the bullfight as a religious sacrifice, the last remnant of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the bull.

Would Lorca support the corrida today? It is a question my friends and I often debate over wine. Lorca was a progressive, a man of the people. But he was also a man of the earth, of the gypsum and the olive trees. I believe he would still defend it, not for the sake of cruelty, but because he believed a civilization that turns its back on death also turns its back on life.

 

The Final Pass

 

As the sun sets over Madrid, I think of Lorca’s words. He taught us that the bullfight is essentially a tragedy—a three-act play where the outcome is written, but the performance is everything.

Whether you view the bullfight as art or barbarism, Lorca remains the bridge. He forces us to look at the sand, the blood, and the geometry of the cape, and find the profound human emotion hidden within. He reminds us that, in the end, we are all in the ring.