Bullfighting is bloodsport. Let’s set aside euphemism and accept that fact from the outset.
There’s never a reprieve, nor any chance of a languid, bloodless match. The sands of the corrida will always turn red. Each and every time a bull, a horse or a man – sometimes all three – will suffer, bleed and die.
Last October, matador Juan José Padilla suffered a horrific goring that cost him an eye and sent shockwaves
through the bullfight world. On Sunday, March 4 he’s back in the ring, eye-patch and questionable depth perception and all, for his first post-injury bullfight.
The passion that brings him back is difficult to comprehend, even for some Spaniards. But every Spaniard understands this is one of those seminal events,
like the famous mano a mano spectacles of the last century (where rival matadors would tour the country in highly choreographed tournaments) – that transfixes the Spanish-speaking and bullfight-appreciating worlds, and ensures bullfighting will never die.
And it probably won’t, despite the efforts of groups like PETA. In 2010 the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia became the first mainland Spanish territory to outlaw bullfighting, but its doubtful that’s the start of a trend.
Because bullfighting, throughout southern Spain, is ingrained. It’s a way of life. Foreigners and outsiders can come to understand it, but only through years of immersion and cultural and linguistic fluency like Hemingway mastered before 
he treated the subject fictionally, in the Sun Also Rises, and as a journalist, in Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer.
Of course by then, he was no longer an outsider. For most of the rest of us, we outsiders, there’s little such chance of learning, understanding, in any way appreciating bullfighting. We see blood, we see slaughter, we see an incomprehensible enthusiasm fueled by something we think is supposed to be repellent.
Maybe we should also try to see a wider view, one not so colored by our own cultural preferences. The signficance for Spain of bullfighting is obvious and undeniable. Something has made la corrida a bedrock of 
Spanish character. This alone argues for it as a legacy from antiquity. And if we follow other clues from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, we can guess that some form of the sport goes back millennia.
But whether or not bullfighting pre-dates the founding of Rome, it seems sure it’s here for now, in Spain and elsewhere, for the foreseeable future.
We outsiders can get used to that, or picket with PETA, or we can gnash our teeth then ignore it. It’s possible though not likely we can even bring ourselves, through cultural curiosity, to appreciate something about bullfighting – perhaps something about what bullfighting means to Spain.
Maybe here’s where we can start, and it’s maybe even somewhere that Spain and the Minoan bull-leapers from antiquity can meet us halfway: the corridas de touras of Portuguese bullfighting:
