In a clear provocation to its great rival Barcelona, Spain's capital city of Madrid has officially elevated bullfighting to the status of a protected art form, as matadors, philosophers and politicians become embroiled in a furious dispute over the country's bloody but emblematic sport.
While the parliament of the north-eastern region of Catalonia debates a total ban on bullfighting, Madrid's local government has declared it a protected piece of the region's cultural heritage. Esperanza Aguirre, head of the conservative regional government in Madrid, announced that the bullfight was to be included on the list of items of "special cultural value" that were protected by law.
"It is an art-form that deserves to be protected and that has been part of Mediterranean and Spanish culture since time immemorial," she said.
The eastern regions of Valencia and Murcia immediately declared the bullfight part of their protected cultural patrimony, thus confirming its new status as a key weapon in the long-running battle of identities waged between Spain's fractious regions. The move puts the corrida on the same cultural level as Madrid's most important historical buildings and monuments. It gives fight organisers special tax breaks and, critics claim, could see those trying to stop bullfights being taken to court for "damaging" the region's cultural patrimony.
Fines for those who damage Madrid's protected cultural patrimony range from €60,000 to €1.2m.
The decision not only widens the gulf between Madrid and Catalonia but also emphasises the divide between those who see bullfighting as either a cruel sport or as high culture. Spanish newspapers have always treated it as the latter, with reviewers writing on the culture pages. Aguirre now leads the second group, which includes some leading leftwing intellectuals, artists and performers, including José Tomás, the torero whose daredevil style has made him the darling of bullfighting purists.
Aguirre named painters such as Pablo Picasso and Francisco Goya and poets and playwrights such as Federico García Lorca as among those who had considered bullfighting to be an essential part of Spanish culture. That was something, she added, also recognised American writer Ernest Hemingway and the film-maker Orson Welles.
"Goya, Picasso, García Lorca and, from abroad, Hemingway and Orson Welles have all dealt with bullfighting as an art form," she said.
Hemingway devoted his book The Dangerous Summer to chronicling the rivalry between bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez in the 1959 season.
Welles's ashes were buried in the Ordóñez family's back garden in Ronda, southern Spain.
The governments of Madrid, Valencia and Murcia are all run by the conservative People's party, which views bullfighting as a vote-winner.
The writer and bullfight fan Mario Vargas Llosa said the Catalonian ban, which is expected to be passed next month, was having an opposite effect elsewhere in Spain. "It is true that the bullfight now has many critics, but instead of diminishing the enthusiasm of fans this hostility has only served to increase it," he said.
In Barcelona, meanwhile, the committee set up by Catalonia's parliament in response to a public petition for it to ban bullfighting has heard evidence from bullfighters, philosophers, writers and vets. The French philosopher Francis Wolff, a bullfighting fan and professor at the Sorbonne, was called as a witness by those opposing the ban. Wolff, author of Philosophy of the Bullfight, said that fighting bulls would not exist without bullfighting. "They have been conserved as a breed precisely because of their bravery," he said. "The only use they have is exactly the one for which they have been bred."
He was opposed by the Spanish philosopher Pablo de Lora, who said: "Over time the bullfight has got crueller." The anti-bullfight veterinarian José Zaldívar told the committee that claims that the bulls felt little pain when a matador sank a sword into its neck to kill it were wrong.
In the great majority of cases, he said, the matador missed the vital spot that would cause the bull to die quickly. "These provoke internal bleeding," he said. "It is a slow, agonising death – as the high acidity of their blood proves."
Salvador Boix, Tomás's manager, accused Catalonia's parliament of hypocrisy for trying to ban bullfighting while passing measures to protect the correbous, a regional tradition in which burning torches are attached to bulls' horns. "This is just an attempt to force bullfighting fans into hiding," said Boix.
Campaigners lobbying for a ban in Madrid were outraged by the decision to protect the bullfight. "It is a bad strategy," said Marta Jiménez, of the Association of Veterinarians for the Abolition of the Bullfight. "Bullfighting is losing popularity and politicians should realise that supporting it is a bad strategy." But the retired bullfighting legend José Miguel Arroyo, "Joselito", praised Aguirre's decision. "It was about time. People need to wake up and defend those things that mark our identity," he said.