Navarrese by birth and Barcelona by adoption, Fernando del Arco Izco has died in Barcelona, leaving a trail of bonhomie and fight for the Festival in Catalonia in a hobby marked by the influence and spell of the figure he always considered « the greatest”, Manuel Rodríguez ‘Manolete’.
On July 2, 1941, at the age of eight, he went with his father to the Barcelona Monument to witness his first bullfight. Above all, the world he discovered that afternoon impressed him with the bullfighter from Cordoba, so much so that he followed him in all his performances in the two squares of the Catalan capital until his tragic death in Linares in 1947. He mourned Manolete and no longer separated himself from the myth. He became a good fan and began to acquire a library which grew and grew until reaching seven thousand bullfighting-themed copies.
At the same time, the writer Fernando del Arco emerged. As it could not be otherwise, in 1997 he published ‘Manolete fifty years after his death’. ‘The Caricature and the Bulls’, ‘El Juli, Historia de una Will’ and ‘Catalan Bullfighters’, among other titles, appear in bookstores.
But he needed to complete his commitment to the Monster of Córdoba, and since the fifties he began to gain poems that had Manolete as the protagonist. The first became dozens, hundreds of poems and odes inspired by the great figure, and the hundreds added up to more than a thousand. In 2006 he published ‘Parnaso manoletista’, where he collected eight hundred poems by about five hundred authors, and ten years later he added another six hundred works in a second edition. From Manuel Machado to Gerardo Diego. From Duyos to Agustín de Foxá y Pemán. From Jaime Campmany to Joaquín Sabina and Antonio Burgos.
The figure of Fernando del Arco was common in the lower reaches of the Monumental in Barcelona, taster of the best bullfighting and always supportive of the bullfighters. He helped the Catalan bullfighters take their first steps and was always at the forefront to defend bullfighting in his adopted land, which he always considered his own.
He was a pillar in the fight for the Fiesta, an activist on the front line of that miraculous resistance that is still alive in the battle for lost freedom. He never turned his face to the political unreason of the prohibition of bullfighting against the law.
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