Drunken Bullfighting in Colombia: Don’t Try This at Home

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  01.30.08 | 12:28 PM ET

imageWhat happens to the untrained and often inebriated matadors involved in corraleja, Colombia’s amateur form of bullfighting, when they take on pissed-off bulls? New York Times writer Simon Romero likened their wounds to those in a Hieronymus Bosch painting: “intestines peeking out of a belly, bone protruding from a fractured shin, blood spurting from a gash in the buttocks.” Yeouch.

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Tags: South America, Colombia

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


1 Comment for Drunken Bullfighting in Colombia: Don’t Try This at Home

John M. Edwards 01.31.08 | 1:31 AM ET

Hi Joanna:

Nice job! This bloody spectator sport, “drunken bullfighting,” brings to mind something a little kinder and gentler in Southwestern France. It’s called the “Course Landaise,” wherein ornery heiffers, instead of raging bulls, charge after the slightly wimpy matadors and are never killed. This is bullfighting without the bull! And well worth seeing once or twice. But the real macho sport here in Gascony is surviving a shot of “unaged Armagnac”—like being kicked in the head by a demonic fire-breathing beast from Hieronymus Bosch’s unpublished sketchbooks. The hangover makes Picasso’s “Guernica” seem tame and lame in comparison.

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