Despite the Minister of Culture’s efforts to put an end to bullfighting, the Festival is still alive. According to the Cultural Statistics Yearbook 2024published this Thursday, a total of 1,474 bullfighting events were held last year, a figure that is 3.44 percent higher than that recorded in 2019, before the pandemic sank the number of bullfights. The number of registered bullfighting professionals also continues to rise: year after year the total number grows to 10,838 registered in 2023. A few days ago, Ernest Urtasun He insisted in Congress that the suppression of the National Bullfighting Award responded to the “evident and growing social rejection in Spain towards violence against animals.”
Of the 1,474 celebrations held in 2023, 25.9 percent were bullfights. The rest were rejones celebrations, bullfights with picadors, festivals, mixed celebrations, bullfights without picadores or mixed bullfights. The total number exceeds the 1,425 celebrated in 2019, but remains below the 1,546 celebrations in 2022, when there was a resurgence after two years of blackout due to Covid closures. The number of shows seems to stabilize at figures similar to those of 2016-2017, after in previous years there had been gradual declines year after year.
What the yearbook does not update is the number of attendees. The last reference is that of the 2021-2022 period, when attendance at the bulls was recorded at 1.9 percent of the population. This has been another of the arguments put forward by Minister Urtasun to justify his rejection of the Festival: that very few people go to the bullrings. This figure is biased, as it includes a year in which the places were closed due to Covid. Between 2006 and 2019, attendance rates have ranged from 8 to 9.8 percent. We will have to wait another year to have figures adjusted to normality. The last Autumn Fair serves as a reference: 936,532 people attended Las Ventas, which was the best figure in the last fifteen years.
The Ministry of Culture celebrated today that cultural employment has grown by 4.4 percent compared to 2023 and that the yearbook includes an increase in the number of spectators at movie theaters or in the number of users registered in public libraries. . Nothing is said about the bulls, of course. After eliminating public subsidies for bullfighting and suppressing the National award arguing that some 3,000 people or entities support the measure in the public consultation process, Urtasun now hopes that the popular legislative initiative sponsored by Sumar to revoke the protection of the Festival as cultural heritage. “It is common sense to avoid financing animal abuse with Spanish taxes,” says the head of Culture.
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