Wander The Marble: Calasparra

We went to the local bull ring to take in an evening of watching the bullfights. The bull ring stadium is very small, quite old (130 or so years old). It appears to have not changed in the 130 years of it’s existence: concrete bench seating, arched ceilings in the stairways leading to the seats, wooden support structures where the tree branches/trunks were used and not cut into the beams we see in structures today. We are transported back in time. The bull fight starts out in ceremonious style with a 20 person band that comes out into the dirt ring, plays music around the ring and finally stops int front of the presidential box to salute the president, who in turn, joyfully acknowledges the band. This is a common theme throughout the evening as the bullfighting president is the overseer of the evenings festivities whether it’s the pomp and circumstance or acting as a referee during each bull fight. This evening of bull fights was to have six separate fights (six bulls) against three young bull fighters (21-25 years old). Each bullfighter gets two turns. The bullfight is interesting in that it is a performance and a systematic procedure that involves not only the bullfighter, but a super intense initial darting out of the bull into the ring chasing several guys around who have their individual “capes”, a second guy who comes out on a Kevlar covered horse to “prep” the bull, several new guys who come out with two colorful harpoons that are there to pierce the shoulder blade area of the bull (you may see these hanging from the bull at times), and finally the main bullfighter, who goes through several steps in the bullfight “process”. What we learned was that each person along the way has to do their job with pinpoint accuracy to not injure the bull too much or just plainly miss their target and have a pissed off bull for the main bullfighter to deal with, as this is also an artistic performance by the main bullfighter. Any misstep by the predecessors in steps one and two can make for a poor performance and even us novices picked up on it. The bullfight educated crowd will let the performers know about it! Overall, it was an interesting cultural experience, and the end was very hard to watch.

Afterwards, we saw the bullfighters at our hotel while we were eating dinner. We found out that we were the only people staying at that hotel that were not involved with the bullfight! We saw Christian Perez Lopez, the torero who was the clear winner of the evening, and showed him some pictures that we took of the fight. He gave us his email so we could send him a few.

We then wandered into the little bar attached to the hotel and ran into a guy named Javier who was one of the Picadoros. Those are the guys who ride the kevlar horses and initially stab the bull. He was really nice and told us that he is a therapist for a soccer team by day and does the Picadoro thing as a side gig. It was so interesting talking to these guys, or should I say TRY to talk to them. Let’s just say there wouldn’t have been much conversation if it weren’t for Google translate!

Visiting Calasparra is the main reason we’ve come to Spain. Helmut has some family history here so we decided to see if we could find any long lost relatives.

We hadn’t even been in town more than 24 hours when we found some people who would help us.
We approached a bunch of older folks sitting in a park and through charades, Google Translate, and some really bad attempts at Spanish, they connected us with someone who gave us some pretty good info about possible family relations in town. It was pretty cool to watch it all unfold.

We stayed the Primavera Hotel and we were surprised to find a full size jacuzzi in our room!

Turns out all the bullfighting people were staying at our hotel.

Bullfighter’s capes draped over the fence outside the hotel

On Day 2, we got up early and went to see the running of the bulls

Calasparra was having a Festival and the bullfighting was a big part of that. I will post some photos in another post, but beware that some of them are gory.