Is bullfighting always awful? Paddy Woodworth returns to the bullring after 30 years and reflects on a fatal attraction

There you are, sipping your tinto placidly in Seville or Pamplona. Controversy could not be further from your mind and those of your assembled friends and loved ones.

Then somebody spots a gaudy poster advertising a bullfight and the gap between their brains and their mouth must have suddenly collapsed, because they suggest out loud that it might be fun, or at least interesting, to go along and take a look.

An Abbey Theatre board meeting would be decorum itself compared to the mayhem that ensues. The woman who made the suggestion has suddenly become a pariah. Her husband won't sleep with her and her daughter won't take her snorkelling.

Quite a few natives share this antipathy towards the bullfight. "Aquí se tortura," they chant outside the bullrings, "no es arte ni cultura." ("They torture here . . . it's neither art nor culture.")

But most Spanish newspapers still review bullfighting on their arts pages. There is no meeting point between those who see the bullfight as the quintessence of cruelty and those who see it as a ritual of exquisite and terrible beauty.

But you are a foreigner, you don't have to take sides, you just want to form your own opinion. So you sneak along with your indiscreet friend, hiding from your own family. What do you actually see? Here is a snapshot.

Last month I returned to the bullring in Pamplona, where I saw my first corrida" 30 years ago. I have been to several others since, never with great enthusiasm, and always finding myself simultaneously awed and nauseated when there.

In the meantime I have read A L Kennedy's quite brilliant and very disturbing little book, On Bullfighting. It would be vain to try to better the torrent of adjectives the subject inspires in her: "What happens in the ring is . . . complicated, repellent, fascinating, grotesque, sacramental, ugly, ritualistic, haphazard, sacred and blasphemous." But perhaps I could add two more: "cruel" and "beautiful".

The occasion last month was the final evening of the San Fermín fiestas in Pamplona. A Basque friend, Maribel, had rung to say she could get me into the patio de caballos, loosely translatable as the "horses' courtyard". I wasn't quite sure what this place was and whether I wanted to go there. But when I mentioned it to veterans of the fiesta, their envy made the invitation irresistible.

Our tickets got us into the stadium, but not into the stalls. As in a good theatre, we had to wait until the first bull was actually killed before we could interrupt the sightlines of other spectators.

We were in el territorio Comanche. This is the sunny side of the bullring, where Pamplona's legendary Peñas congregate. The Peñas are 19 clubs, each up to 1,000 strong, whose members do not seem to sleep during the fiesta. They eat, drink, sing, dance, and march non-stop, and they see no reason to pause for breath during a bullfight.

This makes the San Fermín bullfights rather unusual. The corridas are undoubtedly the real thing, not the kind of ghastly, half-assed show for tourists you might see on the Costas.

And so about half the audience remains seated, critically studying every nuanced step in this dance towards death. But the other half wave banners and chant slogans - the Peñas tend to be radical in their politics.

"People in Seville and Madrid keep their mouths shut and watch," one leading Peña member had told me earlier in the week, almost in disbelief. The Peñas prefer to make their own entertainment, and drenching each other in wine is essential.

The second of the night's three bullfighters, Luis Miguel Encabo was already testing out his first bull, from the historic herd of cattleman Victorino Martín, for which there are always great expectations.

The matador and his assistants draw the bull around the arena with their capes, gauging its fitness, speed and, above all, its character: that intangible mixture of danger and intelligence which makes a bull worth fighting - or not.

This bull looks lively enough to me, though the El País critic will dismiss him the next day, along with the rest of the "Victorinos", as "flabby and cowardly, lacking any quality whatsoever". Hell, what do critics know?

Flabby or not, he needs to be weakened before the matador will attempt to move in for the kill. This is the role of the picadors, horsemen whose mounts are heavily padded, blindfolded and ear-plugged.

The next phase strikes many novice observers, including this writer, as the most dramatic and elegant section of the event, and it may well be the most dangerous to the human participants.

Two men, unmounted and without even a cape to protect themselves, each thrust a pair of brightly decorated darts between the bull's shoulder blades. To do this, they must lean over the bull's horns while poised on tiptoe, an exercise that looks positively suicidal. They succeed, unscathed, and all four darts remain fixed in place.

Yet these banderilleros get little of the kudos accorded to the matador, who comes into his own in the last and deadly act of the drama. The matador (literally "killer") has to do a lot more than his name implies.

He must first dominate the bull, in a series of passes with the cape, from a repertoire resembling that of a ballet dancer.

Next comes the most difficult bit: the sight of a large wounded animal, bleeding copiously, being played to a standstill like a fish on a line, is horrible in many respects, no question.

And yet, and yet . . . there is something absolutely riveting about this grim pas de deux, as bull and man engage in an ever more intimate ritual.

All the clocks seem to stop as Luis Miguel Encabo and the bull shift into a zone where each is constantly within an ace of killing the other.

There is something respectful, even tender, about the way Encabo elegantly leads the bull to its final moment. Mercifully, a single cool and efficient thrust - it is not always thus - of the estocada, the fatal blade, brings the matter to a close.

The bull has suffered terribly. Supporters of the corrida argue that this distinctive race, the toro bravo, would not exist without the bullfight, for which they are specially bred.

Animal rights activists counter that breeding bulls for a cruel death is obscene and want the EU to ban the entire spectacle. The EU has already intervened at our next port of call, the patio de caballos. This turns out to be the courtyard from which the picadors ride into the arena and to which the dead bull is unceremoniously dragged by three horses to be weighed, bled and dispatched for butchery in a gleaming refrigerated van.

The van is the EU's doing: until food police from Brussels called a halt to the practice, the bull was dismembered right there on the patio.

Even with this reform, this courtyard is no place for the squeamish. The ground is already slippery with the blood of two bulls when we arrive. A third comes thudding and hurtling towards us behind three gaily pennanted horses as we are handed steaming bowls of chickpea and chorizo stew.

Nobody else seems to lose their appetite. Indeed, appetites seem to be whetted by the curiously heady atmosphere. Death as a stimulant? It's not a pretty thought, but perhaps there is something healthy about a culture where children are not fooled into thinking that meat is something born in a sterilised supermarket package.

On the scale of human cruelty that we can observe every day on our TV screens, the ritual of the bullfight can seem almost comforting. Perhaps we should view it as a confrontation with brutality and death in an elaborate cultural context that gives it due place in our lives. To ignore it is to do so at our psychological peril.

In any case, apathy, rather than animal rights activists, may dictate the end of this unique cultural event.

"This will all be gone in two generations," says a new friend at the patio de caballos. "The young people aren't interested any more."

Will Spain be a better place because of this? I'm not sure.