According to legend, in Coria a young man was chosen by lot to go out into the streets and defend his life against attacks inflicted by other neighbors with knives and daggers. Normally this boy used to die cruelly. This happened every year at the summer solstice.
At one point, luck decided that the chosen one would be the only son of a very wealthy lady who, faced with the suffering caused by the painful death of her offspring, proposed to the town to exchange her son for a bull, and the town accepted.
Surely that woman had, from her earliest childhood, year after year, taken her son to participate in that tradition; surely both of them, along with the rest of their family, were the first to stab those boys with daggers; surely then they would happily celebrate a good dinner to regain strength and comment on the best atrocities of the party. And surely among them there would be some detractor of the tradition who tried to "spoil" the party by talking every year about the unnecessary pain and death suffered by those boys. And surely that woman and her son would raise their voices to the sky and defend the centenary festival of their town with all imaginable cultural arguments.
But when luck, which is sometimes very treacherous, fell on her son, that woman experienced firsthand that pain that those "party spoilers" told her about. Thanks to this woman and her money, the festival evolved, the boys of the town stopped being the victims of the wrath of their neighbors to become executioners themselves and a new victim took their place.
"In the next San Juan festivities, the Standard Bearer, chosen from among the councilors of the Coria City Council, will be responsible for ensuring that everything goes well. The confinement is done from the corrals to the toril led by the young men. There the bull will wait until its release in the Plaza de España where, once bullfighted, it is released through the streets of the old town. The walls with their tightly closed gates will prevent the bull from escaping."
This is what we are told "officially" about this festival, but the reality is not so simple for its main protagonist. In this "liberation" of the bull through the streets of Coria, participants usually throw darts at the animal using blowguns. These darts are points adorned with a special finish in paper and are stuck in the animal's skin, including parts as sensitive as the snout, nose and eyes of the bull. In the end, the bull to which hundreds of darts have been thrown resembles the tailor's pin cushions, always full of pins, hence its name: TOROS ACERICO. This suffering lasts two hours, finally the pin cushion bull is led to the "wall of scares" where two darts specially decorated for the occasion are stuck in its face. Behind him await the highest authorities of the city and he is received by a "matador" who kills him with shotgun shots. As a culmination of the festival, the testicles of the pin cushion bull are cut off.
The inhabitants of Coria defend this festival because it is a tradition that dates back to the 12th century. There are traditions that cannot be defended; at the very moment in which an animal, human or non-human, suffers due to an absurd tradition, that tradition, even if it is millenary, ceases to be culture to become barbarism.
We are obliged to remember that all this happens with the approval of the local and state authorities and financed with public funds. What are we waiting for? For a wealthy cow to pay so that her tender bull is not mistreated and tortured to death through the streets of Coria and instead they use a cardboard bull? We all know that this would only happen in a children's story, here the happy ending can only be written by each of us. Ending violence for reasons of sex, race, religion or, as in this case, species is in our hands, in everyone's, in mine and in yours that now read this article. Now you know the facts, now you must decide: what will you do this year? Will you stand with your silence next to the torturers or will you give your voice to the victims without their own voice?
Alicia Asategui
