Campaigners in Spain and Portugal are calling for minors to be kept away from bullfights and bull-running events, citing the trauma they cause and after children were injured in incidents in both countries.
The animal-rights party Pacma has asked the Spanish culture ministry to introduce a ban for under-16s at bullfights.
Pacma said that it was “crucial to apply this rule to bullfights in order to protect minors from the violence which is involved”. It added that such events can have “a serious impact on the emotional and social development” of children.
In 2018, the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that minors should not take part in or watch bullfights due to their “harmful effects”, but hardly any of Spain’s regional administrations have implemented this advice.
In the northwestern region of Galicia, under-12s cannot attend bullfights and the Balearic Islands introduced an age restriction on them in 1992, but it was withdrawn recently by a new right-wing government. Bullfighting is banned in Catalonia and is not practised on the Canary Islands.
Another concern for activists is the physical safety of children at village festivities in which bulls are taunted and chase locals through the streets and where controls tend to be less rigorous than in bullrings. The San Fermín festival in Pamplona is the biggest and best-known of these, but dozens more take place on a smaller scale across Spain and Portugal.
[ National Bullfighting Prize has been cancelled, says Spanish culture ministerOpens in new window ]
In September two men were killed and a four-year-old girl was among those injured after a bull escaped from the paddock where it was due to be used for a bull-running event in the town of Pantoja, in central Spain.
In August, a 10-year-old girl was hospitalised after being gored by a bull during festivities in Coruche, in southern Portugal. In 2021 Portugal prohibited under-16s from attending bullfights, but the less formal bull-running events have no age restriction.
The Portuguese campaign group Enough of Bullfights has called for age restrictions to be introduced at such events and for the parents of the injured girl in Coruche to be identified in order for them to be made accountable for the incident. The organisation pointed out that a 15-year-old boy died in 2022 at a similar event in the town of Moita, near Lisbon.
The Spanish culture minister, Ernest Urtasun, whose remit includes bullfighting, has not yet responded publicly to Pacma’s request for a national age restriction. However, he is seen as being sympathetic to the campaigners’ cause. Earlier this year, he cancelled the awarding of the National Bullfighting Prize, saying that it rewarded “the torture of animals” and drawing a fierce backlash from bullfighters and others in the industry.
This week, FTL, a major bullfighting association, said it had lodged a legal complaint against the withdrawal of the prize. It argued that Urtasun, who belongs to the left-wing Sumar coalition, had taken the decision on “purely ideological” grounds and that it was “contrary to his duty to promote culture”.
The two sides of the bullfighting debate also clashed recently after Tardes de Soledad (Afternoons of Solitude), a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey, won the prestigious Golden Shell award at the San Sebastián film festival.
Pacma had called, unsuccessfully, for the film not to be shown, warning that it “humanises a violent practice”.
Its director, Alberto Serra, has described himself as a bullfighting fan but has denied that his film had an agenda.
“I don’t like causes or ideology, just cinema,” he told El País newspaper. He added: “Bullfighting isn’t entertainment, it’s a positive value and it is good that it exists.”
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