Through unrelenting rain, surrounded by the thunder of Fallas fireworks, nearly 140 activists took to the morning of Saturday, March 7, outside the Plaza de Toros de Valencia. Each one held a cardboard gravestone. On each gravestone, a name. In each name, the memory of a bull who was tortured and killed in a Spanish bullring over the past year.
The image was sober and powerful: a collective ceremony of mourning, silent, in the very heart of Las Fallas, Valencia's most internationally celebrated festival. The action was called by AnimaNaturalis and CAS International with a clear purpose: to make visible that behind the folklore and the spotlights lies a system of animal exploitation sustained, year after year, with public funds.
"The Valencian government would rather channel hundreds of thousands of euros into promoting spectacles based on animal suffering, while cutting social services, support for the Valencian language and aid for the victims of the DANA floods. It is a question of priorities, and the priorities of this government are unacceptable", said Delia Molina, representative of AnimaNaturalis in Valencia.
The data backs up the complaint. The Conselleria de Cultura under the executive of Carlos Mazón allocated 300,000 euros in direct subsidies to the Fundación Toro de Lidia in 2025. Adding further budget lines, the total directed toward bullfighting events that year exceeded 450,000 euros. At the same time, the same government cut funding to trade unions, to the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua and to social organisations serving the region's most vulnerable people.
Public money keeps funding cruelty
Bullfighting is no longer an unresolved cultural debate. Surveys say so with growing clarity. According to a 2022 study by the BBVA Foundation, nearly eight in ten Spaniards oppose the use of animals in bullfighting spectacles. Decades of debate have produced an unambiguous social verdict: the majority of citizens reject the instrumentalisation of bulls for entertainment — and all the more so when that entertainment is publicly funded.
The Ministry of Culture survey on cultural habits (2018–2019, covering 16,000 respondents) confirmed that only 5.8% of the population attended any bullfighting event during the period studied; and of that percentage, nearly one in five did not pay for entry. Attendance, therefore, is marginal — and part of it does not even represent real consumption of the spectacle.
The historical trend is equally telling. Between 2009 and 2019, events held in bullrings fell by half: from 2,684 to 1,425. The brief uptick in 2022, attributed by the sector itself to a surplus of animals on farms and falling wages within the industry, did nothing to alter that structural trajectory. Bullfighting is losing audiences, losing relevance and losing social legitimacy. What it is not losing, however, is its subsidies.
"Every year, during Las Fallas, we return to Valencia to demand that this internationally acclaimed festival stop being complicit in the torture of animals. Bullfighting not only divides society — it consumes public resources that could go to those who truly need them", adds Molina.
The Valencian situation illustrates this contradiction with particular starkness. One in three Valencians lives at risk of poverty. The region was still nursing the wounds of the DANA floods — a catastrophe that demanded urgent institutional and budgetary mobilisation. In that context, choosing to direct more than 450,000 euros a year to the bullfighting sector is not a neutral decision: it is a declaration of values.
Memory as a tool for transformation
The action of March 7 was not only a protest. It was a proposal for a different way of understanding Las Fallas and collective celebration: without victims, without blood, without public money prolonging a declining industry.
The model exists. Cities and communities around the world celebrate their traditions without instrumentalising any sentient being. Las Fallas, with their explosion of creativity, monumental sculptures, fire and music, are among the most admired cultural spectacles on the planet. They do not need bullfighting to shine. And neither do those who live them.
What AnimaNaturalis and CAS International are demanding is, at its core, consistency: that institutions listen to the citizen majority that rejects bullfighting as entertainment, that public funds stop flowing toward a sector with minimal real demand whose activity involves the systematic torture and killing of individuals who feel, suffer and flee — and that this money be redirected to those who urgently need it. "What we will witness on Saturday outside the bullring is not an act of hatred toward anyone, but an act of memory and mourning. Every name we carry represents a life that did not have to be lost", says Molina.
This vision is already finding institutional echo elsewhere in Spain. Autonomous communities such as the Canary Islands and Catalonia — where children under 14 have been barred from attending bullfights for years — have moved to distance their institutions from the bullfighting sector. Change is possible. And when it happens, nobody loses their identity. Only consistency is gained — between the values proclaimed and the decisions made.
Now it's your turn
The change that 140 activists demanded in the rain in Valencia will not come without more voices. Yours matters. Las Fallas have once again put the spotlight on a contradiction that can no longer be ignored: a government that cuts social spending while subsidising the suffering of animals who have no voice, no vote and no way out.
You can act today. Share this information on your social media and break the silence surrounding bullfighting subsidies. Talk to your family, your friends, those who still believe this is a matter of personal taste rather than public money and real suffering. Sign and support the initiatives demanding an end to public subsidies for the bullfighting sector across Spain. And if you can go further, consider joining or donating to AnimaNaturalis: every contribution funds direct actions like the one this Saturday in Valencia, investigations documenting the treatment of bulls, and campaigns that have achieved real change in legislation and public opinion.
The names on those gravestones had someone who caused their death before they ever entered the ring. Today we give them a name because they deserve to be remembered. And because memory, when it is shared, becomes action.
