A Spanish Confinement II: My second coronavirus article in the Daily Telegraph

For the original article, available to subscribers only, please click here.

DAILY TELEGRAPH

A postcard from Spain, where the Marines have arrived to enforce our draconian lockdown

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

20th March 2020

The Marines rolled into town on Friday to ‘support’ the police and the Guardia Civil. Admittedly they arrived in olive green pick-up trucks, not Humvees or 4-tonners, and were only kitted out with 9mm pistols strapped to their thighs, not full assault rifles, but those who questioned my last postcard from Andalusia, where I spoke of “martial law in all but name”, should be under no illusion about the Spanish style of lockdown.

As I predicted, last week the government extended our fortnight of house-arrest to a full month, and this week they instituted even harsher measures, putting the economy into “hibernation” in the government’s terrifying phrasing.

A Spanish Confinement I: My first coronavirus article in the Daily Telegraph

 

For the original article, available to subscribers only, please click here.

DAILY TELEGRAPH

Here in Spain there is martial law in all but name – surely the British wouldn’t put up with it

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

20th March 2020

It was when they taped off the children’s playground on the Plaza de la Constitución, as though it were a crime scene, that we knew the rumours were true.

All that Saturday the streets had been empty of people save the town’s ex-pat population as the Spanish government debated at every level – local, provincial and national – about what would put on ‘lockdown’ and how. I came down from my balcony to investigate as the local police pinned a notice to the swings, reading “Proclamation: Preventative Measures for the Protection of Citizens against the Coronavirus”, written in the name of the Mayor, and followed by a list of closures ranging from the municipal library to the 12th-century Moorish castle which stands guard over our Andalusian hilltop town.

Knowing that more was sure to come we stayed at Bar Pastor until closing time. The next morning we woke up to find the police sealing that bar, and all the others. It had begun.

Our new project:

This is the new project we have been working on for some time to bring polo to Mauritius has been agreed: with the government’s tourism agency, the owner of the grandest hotel on the island, Sanjiv Ramdanee, and the man who has been the single greatest innovating force in exotic location non-club based polo, Reto Gaudenzi of Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz and the World Snow Polo Championships. More details follow at www.InternationalPoloEvents.com.

Mauritius is set to host a prestigious polo match later in the year following the signing of a new partnership.
The news was announced at the annual Snow Polo World Cup, hosted each year in St. Moritz.
Arvind Bundhun, chief executive of the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority, made the announcement during a gala dinner hosted at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel.
He was welcomed to the stage by Reto Gaudenzi, chief executive of St. Moritz Snow Polo, and joined by Sanjiv Ramdanee, chief executive of Maradiva Villas Resort & Spa.

International Polo Events join Mr Bundhun, Mr Ramdanee and Mr Gaudenzi to make this happen. We thank our new partners for inviting us to help bring polo back to the Indian Ocean: more details soon at www.MauritiusPolo.com.

 

contact@internationalpoloevents.com

 

International Polo Events Ltd.

Incorporated at Companies House, 80 Petty France, Westminster, London SW1H 9EX, United Kingdom

Company Number 12348482

Bulls and Horses, Horses and Bulls…

Famed ‘Torrestrella’ bull-breeder – and founder of the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art – Álvaro Domecq Romero, Spain’s number one matador Juan José Padilla, author Alexander Fiske-Harrison, photographer Nicolás Haro, and Don Álvaro’s favourite pura raza, ‘Pure Spanish’, stallion at Los Alburejos in 2009 (Photo: AFH personal collection)

It was sad to see confirmed in the press the rumour I heard from the Núñez del Cuvillo family that Álvarito Domecq has sold his legendary ranch, where he not only bred the famed Torrestrella – ‘Star Tower ‘ – bulls, so named for the ruined castle overlooking his estate, but also bred his pura raza Española horses – what we call ‘Andalusians’ in English – and founded one of the most important Schools of Riding in the World. Mind you, €20 million is not a bad price for a house in rural Spain.

Meanwhile, I have been working on some other bull and horse projects, which will come out through Polo Andalusia and Bullfighting Andalusia in the next few weeks. Along with a book and documentary film project on which more at The Last Arena blog in the same time frame.

Oh, and a visit to the House of Deputies – the House of Commons or Congress of Spain – although not as the Spanish newspaper ABC is suggest to promulgate a “Law Fiske-Harrison”!

¿Se imaginan una Ley Fiske-Harrison de Teo García Egea para derogar la Ley Rhodes de Pablemos?

The full article is, in Spanish, available here:

https://www.abc.es/opinion/abci-ignacio-ruiz-quintano-ley-rhodes-202002120018_noticia.html#

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

THE LAST ARENA: An Essay On Bullfighting – 2019 update

TPP Editor’s Note: As this blog falls in disuse, I leave you with the result of my twenty years research into the world of the bulls on my other site – AFH

TLA Editor’s Note: This 10,000 word essay has been updated for republication since its original appearance in 2016. I have, however, kept the original data from Spain’s Ministry of Culture etc., as relevant changes have not really occurred: there were 1,521 bullfights in 2018, and 17,698 bull ‘festivities’ as defined below. And, as reported on the site here, the great matador Iván Fandiño was killed by a bull in a ring in France – AFH

José Tomás by Carlos Cazalis from his book Sangre de Reyes, ‘Blood Of Kings’

When I first went to my first bullfight 20 years ago, I was 23 and was sure I would hate it. I was a passionate animal lover and had been a keen amateur naturalist since childhood, WWF & Greenpeace member and zoology undergraduate. It is obvious that ot an auspicious CV for a future aficionado a los toros.

As expected, what I saw contained many moments of brutality and blood but I was surprised also to find I could see beyond them to feel moments of breathless thrill as well. What genuinely shocked me, though, was that I could also perceive intermittently, and only with one of the bullfighters present, a kind of beauty that was entirely new to me.

In my moral confusion, I decided to research this alien thing, reading what I could in English – mainly Ernest Hemingway and Barnaby Conrad – and going when possible to see a corrida, a ‘bullfight’, on my irregular visits to Spain. Each time I went with a little more understanding and a little less aversion. Some would argue I became more sensitive to the aesthetics, others that I had become more inured to the ethics (or lack thereof.) I wouldn’t like to say either way.

In 2008 I was commissioned to write a book on the subject and I moved to Seville for two years and among other researches I trained as a bullfighter to the level of matador de novillos-toros – a novice level matador de toros bravos – ending by killing a single animal in the ring, a novillo, a three-year-old bull weighing around a third of a ton. (Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight was published by Profile Books in 2011 and shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award the same year.)

As part of the research, I also attended the encierros, ‘bull-runs’, of Pamplona and ran with fear and ignorance among the masses of drunken foreigners and adrenaline seekers. Unlike those visitors, I returned, and ended up running in towns across Spain, away from the tourist trail and among those born to this bloodless and less ritualised, more pagan practice.

I ran with the bulls from San Sebastián de los Reyes in the suburbs of Madrid, to Falces, where you hurtle pell-mell down a goat-path, bordered by a sheer drop, in the foothills of Navarran Pyrenees. From Tafalla, also in Navarre, which resembles Pamplona in the 1920s to Cuéllar in Old Castille, which hosts the most ancient encierros in Spain.

(The book I edited and co-authored with the Mayor of Pamplona, Ernest Hemingway’s grandson, Orson Welles’s daughter and the finest bull-runners including the late Julen Madina, Jokin Zuasti, Joe Distler and Reuters & EPA photographer Jim Hollander, The Bulls Of Pamplona, was published by Mephisto Press in 2018, purchasing details are online here.)

I may be something of an oddity in my afición in English-speaking countries – although there is a Club Taurino of London as there is of New York – but in Spain (or Portugal, France, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela) the picture is very different.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison running with the Torrestrella bulls of Álvaro Domecq – striped jacket – in Pamplona (Photo: Joseba Etxaburu – Reuters)

According to the annual figures on asuntos taurinos, ‘taurine matters’, published by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, the bulls are on the way back for the first time since the world economy collapsed in 2008.

The number of full-fledged corridas in 2015 stabilised at 394, down only 1% since 2014 compared with that year’s drop of 7% on the year before and 10% before that.

There were even large increases in some regions – Andalusia, Aragon, Murcia, the two Castiles and the Basque Country – and it seems that Madrid was the real fall, perhaps a reflection of the strange political stirrings going on in the capital.

The number of bullfights in the broader sense of the word – including novilladas for novices and rejoneo for horseback toreros etc., – 80% of which occur in Andalusia, Madrid and the two Castiles, had fallen by 7% to 1,736, but this after a slight increase the year before.

Far more importantly in a country where subsidies distort the market, the number of people actually attending bullfights in 2015 was up to 3.7 million, an increase of more than a third of a million since 2011 when my book came out. Back, in fact, to pre-financial crisis levels.

This is alongside some 6.4 million having watched bullfighting on the television to which it had only returned in 2015 (and half a million more on the internet.)

To keep reading please click here…

THE LAST ARENA: The Thrill Has Gone…

El Norte de Castilla

‘The North Of Castile’

ENGLISH VERSION – IN SPANISH ORIGINAL HERE

The Joy Of The Thrill

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Monday, September 9th, 2019

ENGLISH VERSION – IN SPANISH ORIGINAL HERE

Lungs burning, vision fuzzing, heart thumping and hands shaking, I stood watching and chatting with my companions in the street, Josechu Lopez and David Garcia, as the last bull moved up the street last Tuesday, in the antepenultimate encierro of the oldest feria of bull-running in the world, and the last time I expect to find myself sharing the asphalt with my favourite animal ever again.

It is not that I have lost my love for the bull or my affection for encierros, ‘bull-runs’: my admiration for this meeting place for man and beast is entirely undiminished. Nor is it the decrepitude of old age or excesses of an indulgent lifestyle that are pulling me out as I enter my mid-40s: I could still clock a three-and-three-quarter hour marathon in Mont Saint-Michel in France last year, and did my finest taurine runs ever the year before that in such rarified places as Funes and Falces.

Midnight Run – Alexander Fiske-Harrison, far right, running on the horns of a bull in a nocturnal encierro in Funes in Navarre in 2017

No, ten years after my first ever encierro – with Miuras, in San Fermin – I have had to admit that my personal experience of running alongside, and occasionally in front of, such animals has ceased to deliver a pleasure that outweighs the ultimate risk. It is not that, to quote the great B. B. King, “the thrill is gone”, but that the joy in that thrill has.

Click here to read on…

The Right Pin-Up

I found it odd when it was pointed out to me here in wilds of Andalusia, working on building up Polo Andalusia, that the papers had decided to name me pin-up boy for the parties of the Right in Spain, especially under the surname of one of my maternal ancestors, Cecil Rhodes. (The headline El otro Rhodes translates as ‘The Other Rhodes.’)

However, it was another Rhodes they referenced: a ‘celebrity’ musician who plays classical music – by which I mean a person whose public profile as a musician has piggy-backed on his public profile for revelations (his own) about his private life rather than his talent – who has also moved to Spain. Apparently he has decided to wax lyrical in the media about his views on the political failings of the country he has just moved to. A cultural, or rather touristic, imperialism I personally find abhorrent….

That said, although the intention of this article was flattering, I could not find myself flattered by it… you see, my politics, which are usually a private matter, do not match those of the role they are proposing me to fill. 

The article, online here, says:

We need another Englishman similarly Hispanophile to admire.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison (pictured) is my proposal. He is English… of good type … graduated in biology and philosophy at Oxford and London… If Rhodes is immersed in our customs, what Fiske-Harrison likes is The Custom: bullfighting. He is a great aficiondao and a few years ago he published a book about the Fiesta, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight. Apparently, his mentor in bullfighting was Adolfo Suárez Illana [son of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Spain after the death of Franco, and himself number two in the conservative Partido Popular, ‘Popular Party’, for Madrid.]

Fiske-Harrison is presented as “writer and bullfighter”, maintains a blog on bullfighting in English, www.TheLastArena.com, and is also a great aficionado of bull-running, and usually runs dressed in white and with an elegant red jacket looking like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse skidding into calle Estafeta in Pamplona.

Fiske is a patrician, a dandy, an enviable Englishman and also a lover of Spain. Fiske-Harrison is a taurine pro, perhaps the great English taurino of the moment.

THE LAST ARENA: The Great Bulls Of Pamplona

I am completing the conversion of my taurine blog ‘The Last Arena: In Search Of The Spanish Bullfight‘ into the reference site in the English language that it by now should already be.

My latest addition is this new post on the great breeds and bloodlines of fighting bull, in part at the behest of Pamplona’s largest tour operator, Running Of The Bulls, Inc., but also with a nod to the Fundación del Toro de Lidia, ‘Foundation of the Fighting Bull’, the Spanish industry body with whom I am working.

It is also nice to see the ancient University of Valladolid are referencing the book that that blog grew into, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, as one of three works on the subject written in English in the past three centuries that have become works of reference.

University of Valladolid (founded 1241 A.D.)

Faculty of Translation and Interpretation

Masters in Professional and Institutional Translation

Masters Final Thesis

The culture of Bullfighting in the European and American English-speaking world through the authors Richard Ford (1796–1858), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Alexander Fiske-Harrison (1976-)

Presented by José Manuel Toquero Martín

 (Click here to download the full thesis.)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

My article in the Daily Mail on Seville

 

My article in today’s Daily Mail (original as image below).

THE THRILLS OF SEVILLE

By Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Flamenco is just one way to enjoy the wild spirit of this elegant Spanish city

SEVILLE’S motto is “she has not deserted me”. In the 13th century the city rose in favour of King Alfonso the Wise against a rebellious son.

Nowadays, it’s the tourists who do not desert her. From the Gothic splendours of the cathedral to the alleys of the old Jewish Quarter, it is a place to wander and wonder.

HISTORIC LESSON

AS THE birthplace of Roman Emperors, Trajan and his wall-building successor Hadrian, Seville’s classical origins are apparent. There are magnificent ruins, including at 25,000-seat amphitheatre, at nearby Italica.

By the 16th century Seville was at the heart of Spain’s Golden Age, due to its exclusive Royal license for all trade with the newly discovered Americas.

Notorious fictional knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, was born here in 1597 while his creator was in prison in the Royal Jail of Seville. The country’s greatest painter Diego Velázquez was born here two years later.

THE LAND OF WOLVES: The Return Of The Wolf

My latest post on my project researching wolf conservation and reintroduction for a proposed book on my blog, ‘The Land Of Wolves’, online here.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison