During my stay in Cuenca, I experienced the annual week-long Festivales de Cuenca held in November, celebrating its independence from Spanish rule. There are concerts, food expos, circuses, craftshows, etc. throughout town for the event. On the final weekend, there are two days of corridas de toros (bullfights), each day with six fights each. I attended the second day's event.
These photos serve as a complete visual narrative of the progression of events in a traditional Spanish bullfight.
-Brian
(Disclaimer: This gallery contains scenes with blood and death. Queazy or sensitive viewers are thus cautioned.)
Each corrida begins with the bull being released into the plaza de toros (bullring) full of energy and already agitated by the handlers. Agitated and disadvantaged. The bull has already been tagged with some sort of injection, from which you can still see the needle in its back, and has also had ground up powder thrown in its eyes, leaving it more or less blinded. (These two aspects may or may not be true, as I have not been able to prove them through research. I can say that there is definitely some object stuck in the bulls neck when it comes out, but I was only told about the powder.)
So, already in fear and defense of its life, it comes out charging, with a number of toreros (the 6-7 men in the ring who serve to keep the bull active; I refer to them as dummy matadors) to attract its attention. The bull charges them each individually, and they duck away into small exits out of the arena, which the bulls cannot physically enter, but ram into. You can see a torero standing in one of the many exits at the top right of this photo. This takes place for 2-3 minutes, until the bull is quite worn out from all the fruitless running and wall-ramming.
Two of the six bullfights that day featured rejoneros (horsemen) to begin the event, instead of pedestrian toreros. The horses run in circles around the arena, as the rider taunts the bull with a flag, luring it to chase the horse. Occasionally, the bull will find the correct angle and come very close to goring the horse's hind legs. In fact, in this instance, it did get the first horse a little bit (the white one you see in the photo above), so they had to bring out a second horse to finish with, seen here.
The crowd goes crazy when the bull almost gets the horse, but is clearly pulling for the rider to stay away. The closer, the better, however, as this displays more skill by the horseman.
After the bull has been sufficiently worn out by running around the ring, two picadores (armored ram horses) come in, positioning themselves on opposite sides of the ring. Whichever one the bull comes to is the one that does the bulk of the damage in the entire fight. These large horses are draped in strong cloth armor, and are securely blindfolded, so as not to invoke fear in them when the bull comes charging. The rider carries a long stick, armed with a sharp metal lance at one end, used to violently jam into the neck muscles of the bull when it charges the horse. This is to weaken the strong neck muscles so that the bull will keep its head low for the rest of the corrida. The bull always gets to the horse, and the spear is repeatedly rammed and shoved deeper into the bull's neck (but never removed) until the bull pulls away. The crowd boos as the picador drives the spear harder and harder.
The armored horsemen strategically position themselves very near the walls, thus utilizing their extra stability to keep the brute strength of the bull from pushing the horse around the ring.
I saw one bull hit the unexpecting horse so powerfully that it lifted it up on its hind legs, held it there, then drove it hard to the ground. Toreros immediately came over and distracted the bull away, giving the horse time to stand back up, at which point the bull charged it again, and this time it stood its ground, while the bull took its given punishment.
Of note: the actual matador is still yet to enter the ring.
The two succeeding banderilleros then have a target to strike at after the first has placed his spears, and it becomes a competition of accuracy.
In rejoneos, where the horses are utilized, the same rider spears the bull all three times from atop the sprinting horse, using a longer lance known as a rejon.
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