Daredevils Charge Bulls at Festivals in Spain

At WSJ, "To These Bull Runners, Pamplona Is for Wimps: Those Looking for a Lot of Bull Stampede Into Spain's Tiny Towns":

ALCALÁ DE CHIVERT, Spain—For daredevils the world over, Pamplona’s running of the bulls is a once-in-a-lifetime thrill, a chance to charge alongside 1,200-pound beasts hurtling down narrow streets.

For Saul Boix, the annual dash is a cakewalk.

“In Pamplona, you run with the bulls for about two minutes,” the 26-year-old Spaniard said. What really beefs up his adrenaline, he said, is spending an entire day at a town festival, provoking one bull after another to charge him, or if that fails, charging directly at the bull.

“In the small towns,” Mr. Boix said, “you have hours with the animals.”

Every year across Spain, bull-obsessed adrenaline addicts seek their fix by traveling from town to town to participate in local iterations of Pamplona. They’re a haphazard group, so it is hard to hit the bull’s-eye on their numbers—at least several hundred, according to fans and some of the men themselves.

The Mediterranean coastal region of Valencia, Mr. Boix’s home turf, holds around 7,000 festivals each year that feature bulls and cows with horns, mainly in the summer and autumn.

“Where there’s a bull, there’s a fiesta,” said Francisco Miró Simó, 62, president of the club that organizes a festival in nearby Alquerías de Santa Bárbara. “If there are no bulls, only a quarter of the people would show up” at festivals, he said.

“We are always with bulls,” Mr. Boix said of his fellow itinerants. They are often called recortadores, those who intercept the bull’s path, quickly sidestep its charging horns, then use their bodies like a bullfighter’s cape to steer the animal around. They are also called corredores, or runners, when sprinting alongside the animals.

“They see risk as a kind of entertainment,” said José Ramón Caballero de la Calle, a veterinary professor at Spain’s University of Castilla-La Mancha who treats festival bulls...

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BONUS: Flashback to 2010, "Julio Aparicio, Spanish Bullfighter, Gored at Feria San Isidro, Plaza de Toros de las Ventas, Madrid (May 21, 2010)."

Plus, more at my "Pamplona" search link.