Who do you support?

Real Madrid or Barça? Which one is your team? Round here the correct answer, of course, should be Celta de Vigo but in practice most people support one of the big ones as well.

Real Madrid v Barça. Madrid v Barcelona. It’s a long-standing rivalry. I have been given to understand that Real Madrid was supported by a certain general and therefore supporting Barça was in the past a way of quietly stating your opposition to the regime. There are people who maintain that Barcelona should be the capital of Spain as it is supposedly more modern, more cosmopolitan, more European and so on. One of my students even wrote a piece of A-Level Spanish coursework on that very topic a few years ago.

Now, last night Esperanza Aguirre, presidenta of the Comunidad de Madrid was heard to say that "los toros son un arte que merece la pena declarar como Bien de Interés Cultural para que estén bien protegidos". This is in line with the Ley de Patrimonio Histórico, the same one that made the Hercules Tower in La Coruña a national heritage site. According to Ms Aguirre, it’s not just monuments and museums that should be made part of the national heritage but also what she refers to as “bienes inmateriales”. She calls on the support of Goya, Picasso and García Lorca, all of whom celebrated bullfighting in their work. She also refers to Hemingway and Orson Wells for international support.

Now I’m prepared to agree that bullfighting is a part of Spain’s heritage and I can understand the claims for artistry and all the rest of it but I’m on the bull’s side on this. I don’t want to go into it all again now. I’ve done that before and it doesn’t need repeating. All I’ll say on that score is that on one of the websites I looked at someone had commented that maybe Ms Aguirre might care to put her little dog in the bullring and have them treat it in the same way as they treat the bulls!

No, instead I would just like to point out that someone unkindly suggested that the idea of making bullfighting an official part of Spain’s National Heritage and Ms Aguirre’s very public endorsement of it coincided with the Catalan Parliament discussing banning that very sport throughout the whole of Cataluña. Hmmmmm, old rivalries raising their heads again!? España tradicional v España europea!?