Life in Barcelona

You are mistaken if you believe I have ever watched a bull-fight! Personally, I think this mass bull killing is idiotic and annoying. As you perhaps know, Barcelona is an anti-bullfighting city. If you pay a little attention in Barcelona, you can often see that many cars, particularly taxis, do not have the famous black Spanish bull adhesive stuck onto the back of their car, but a donkey instead! An inhabitant told me, that this means that the driver is against bull-fighting.
The WSPA (World Society for the Protection of Animals) accomplished a public opinion poll in Spain, which showed that the large majority of the Spanish population, and in particular the Catalans, reject bullfighting. Thus, for example, already over one million Spaniards have signed a petition for the abolishment of bullfights.

Of course, there are many bull rings still standing across Spain, in hundreds of cities and there are still bullfights taking place in them, but they are not always supported. Why do they take place nevertheless? This question is very simple to answer: Bull-fights live mostly from the tourists, who visit such fights. Accordingly, most of the fights take place during the vacation time.

What is it, exactly, that attracts the tourists to visit the bull-fights? I can’t imagine that so many of them really enjoy a show, in which an animal is brutaly killed during a kind of ceremony. I believe, rather than this, that some tourists simply do not inform themselves properly! They visit a destination such as Spain, where they visit objects of interest and cultural places and they think “let’s experience something typical of this country”. But they perhaps do not think properly about what culture and tradition really are, or about what would be worth doing or experiencing in the moral sense. I have met people who have complained about the brutality of this custom after their arrival back in their home country. But my question is then, why on earth did they even go to see the bull fight in the first place, when the brutality is plainly obvious??… But they don’t have an answer. It is the ignorance and the support of so many tourists, which keeps the bull-fighting business alive and surviving well in Spain today!

/Bea

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 12:09 pm and is filed under General Barcelona, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.