Word: catalonia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this highly autonomous region, others see the rejection of bullfighting as a rejection of Spain itself - and thus a promotion, in the Manichean logic of such things, of Catalan identity. In Catalonia, after all, people dance sardanas instead of flamenco, prefer their death-defying feats in the form of castellers (human towers comprised of people standing on the shoulders of others in ever-smaller circles) and turn every Barça vs. Real Madrid match into a bout for national honor. More substantively - and controversially - the region requires all students to be educated in the Catalan language and is engaged...
...Bullfighting used to be extremely popular in Catalonia," says Matthew Tree, a Barcelona-based author who writes frequently on Catalan identity. "But things change. Franco made it a bastion of fascist Spain, and that switched off a lot of Catalans. It was forced on them as this aggressively Spanish thing, and that was offensive to them...
...Indeed, Catalonia has long led the movement to do away with what is still referred to in Spain as the "national fiesta." In 2003, the region passed a sweeping animal-protection law that, among its many measures, restricted towns without bullrings from building them and prohibited all children under age 14 from attending a corrida by placing the equivalent of an R movie rating on the event. The following year, Barcelona's municipal government declared the Catalan capital an "anti-bullfighting city" in a nonbinding resolution; 70 other Catalan towns and cities have since followed suit. (Read "Spanish TV Says...
...many Catalans opposed to bullfighting? Some point to the region's generally progressive political tendencies, especially when it comes to animal rights. "As a coastal [region], Catalonia has always looked toward the rest of Europe, so certain sensibilities and ideas enter here first," explains Oriol Batista, a city councilman in Mataró, a town that was among the first to impose a no-kill law for abandoned pets...
...Josep Rull, congressman for Convergence I Unio (CiU), a centrist nationalist party, objects to that depiction. "This is not about Catalonia rejecting Spain," he says. "We have our own long tradition of bullfighting. This is about Catalans rejecting bullfighting from within our own tradition because our values have changed...