Everything that is read and seen in Contraquerencia, gathered in one place. Four ways into the notebook.
Essays and reviews free to read, before crossing the threshold.
Enter → iiThe feria notebooks —San Fermín 2026, San Isidro 2026— and the rest of the archive, issue by issue.
Enter → iiiDrawings and collages along the season, made in pen from the stands.
Enter → ivEvery issue of the notebook as a downloadable PDF — reserved for subscribers.
Enter →The notebook is ordered by ferias —San Fermín, San Isidro— and, alongside them, the essays, the dictionary, the graphic work and the books. Every text can be read in full on the site; access to the chronicles is reserved for subscribers.
Pamplona · 6 – 14 July 2026
There are doors that separate two spaces, and others that separate two ways of understanding the same reality. The bull crosses the gate of the bullring. A boy, left outside, discovers that the fiesta has not yet ended.
An anonymous man lets the bull pass and, for an instant, seems to take pleasure in the justness of his own gesture. An old photograph of the Pamplona encierro reveals how the body preserves a memory that words can barely explain.
The city proposes an angle. The bull answers with a curve. At the corner of Mercaderes, an old photograph reveals an essential quality of the fighting bull: the flexibility with which it turns the geometry of the city into movement.
After the Santo Domingo slope, the encierro enters the town-hall square and the city begins to breathe differently. An old photograph helps us discover how the passing of the bull transforms, for a few minutes, the very meaning of urban space.
Long before it became a universal spectacle, the encierro was the passing of a few bulls through a city. An old photograph of Pamplona helps us recover the memory of that world and understand why that presence still moves us today.
Before running, someone decided to wait for the bull. This second essay explores an old photograph of the encierro to discover that the origin of bullfighting may lie not in the run, but in the waiting and in the transforming presence of the bull.
While Pamplona celebrates the Sanfermines, Contraquerencia proposes another way of walking the encierro: eight essays to look slowly at what happens before the run, before the fear and before the ring, when a bull transforms the space with its mere presence.
San Fermín does not begin with the chupinazo, but when the city turns to look at the bull again. An essay on the fiesta, the meaning of rites, and the risk of preserving their forms while forgetting what, for centuries, has kept them alive.
Madrid, Las Ventas · May – June 2026
Madrid responded once again. The stands filled and emotion appeared on many afternoons. But the great matter of San Isidro 2026 was another: the intermittent appearance of the bull, the absolute protagonist of a feria that leaves more questions than answers.
Madrid filled Las Ventas to attend the great final event of San Isidro. Borja Jiménez appeared ready to risk it all. But a corrida unworthy of the occasion slowly transformed the meaning of the word 'encerrona' until it became something quite different.
The victorinos returned to Madrid to recall that a corrida can revolve around the bulls. The first four offered caste, emotion and possibilities. Only Román understood in time what they demanded. The Puerta Grande was his, but the conversation went on revolving around the cattle.
For four and a half bulls, the Juan Pedro corrida advanced between dullness, lack of caste and tedium. When the ring seemed resigned to another afternoon for the forgetting, the fifth bull suddenly recalled that the bulls are still a place where things truly happen.
The sword-handlers marked with paper scraps the only refuge against the wind before the corrida began. Then came the bulls. Emilio de Justo let the best lot of the afternoon slip away and Víctor Hernández put courage before a bull that perhaps demanded to be mastered before being fought.
Three portagayolas, two replacements, a disputed ear and too many bulls without strength. On a grey San Isidro afternoon, the most lucid phrase was uttered by no bullfighter: “You have to take care of the details; the world is full of details.”
The José Escolar bulls were slow to appear. For four bulls, the corrida moved between disappointment and difficulty. But the fifth and the sixth gave back the meaning of an afternoon that ended up speaking less of triumphs than of lidia, intelligence and respect before the bull.
Ferrera opened a historic Puerta Grande after becoming the first matador to pic a bull at Las Ventas. But while the ring watched the spectacle, fascinated, a great Adolfo Martín bull was left unfought. And there lay the true story of the afternoon.
Three bulls sent back, a 715-kilo replacement that looked like a prehistoric bison and a corrida that came apart under the Madrid heat. While the bullfighters sought an impossible afternoon, the oxen and their young foreman ended up stealing the show.
On a scorching afternoon, Urdiales reminded Madrid that bullfighting can also be a matter of truth, purity and craft. Before him, a good Juan Pedro corrida and the contrast between two opposite ways of understanding contemporary bullfighting.
A rough, demanding Pedraza de Yeltes corrida left emotion at the horse, genuine difficulties and scant lucimiento. Jarocho signed the best of the afternoon with three extraordinary naturals in the sixth. More than triumphs, the corrida left questions about craft and place.
Julio Méndez's triumphant presentation in Madrid left far more than two ears: it left the impression of a young bullfighter who wants truly to be someone. Before him, other novilleros showed a deeper doubt: not whether they know how to fight, but whether they really want to.
The Alcurrucén corrida left a strange feeling: there were capable bullfighters, bulls with more possibilities than they seemed and moments of real emotion. But no one knew how to measure time. Very long faenas, excess footage and the constant impression of a missed occasion.
An extraordinary bull can justify a whole feria. “Cantaor”, of Victoriano del Río, forced Castella to put himself at the service of true bravery. The Puerta Grande was lost with the sword, but the emotion was already written in the sand of Madrid.
Carnations in the lapel, artist bullfighters and a full Las Ventas. Then came the cripples, the interminable descabellos and the sham. The Puerto de San Lorenzo corrida left an uncomfortable question: perhaps it was not only the bullfighters who made fools of themselves.
The Saltillo corrida recalled that not all bulls come to collaborate. There was little lucimiento and much roughness, but also dry emotion, real difficulties and bullfighters forced to fight rather than please. Sometimes a corrida's interest is born precisely there.
The Fuente Ymbro novillada left something more interesting than the ears: two presentations with truth. Mario Vilau and Julio Norte arrived in Madrid with willingness, blood and temple. They did not emerge as figures, but as bullfighters worth keeping an eye on.
Fuente Ymbro gave Las Ventas back an afternoon with bull: presence, temperament, transmission and a great Adulador. It was not a complete corrida, but it was an interesting one: of the kind that forces the bullfighter to define himself and the ring to breathe differently.
On the afternoon of remembrance for Joselito, the La Quinta corrida offered little for enthusiasm: tameness, lack of caste and a certain muffled danger. But Manuel Diosleguarde, on his confirmation, held the afternoon up with attitude, commitment and the rare craft of not being boring.
On San Isidro's day there was bull, presence, danger and emotion. The El Torero corrida left material for a great triumph, but also an uncomfortable truth: sometimes it is not the bull that is missing; it is someone able to rise to its level.
The emergency replacement of the El Parralejo bulls with a weak, caste-less Vellosino corrida left in Las Ventas something even more disquieting than boredom: the gradual anaesthesia of a public beginning to normalise what would once have caused a scandal.
The return of Partido de Resina to Las Ventas, seven years on, ended as a disappointment: a corrida lacking caste, static and soulless, that laid bare something deeper still: contemporary bullfighting's loss of resources in the face of difficulty.
With wind, rain and bulls of real caste, the first novillada of San Isidro ended by revealing a name of its own: Álvaro Serrano. Madrid sensed from the first quite that the fair-haired young man had come to Las Ventas ready to change his destiny.
A second afternoon of feria and a second “sold out”. But in Las Ventas one of the hardest experiences in contemporary bullfighting appeared: boredom. A lacklustre corrida of La Quinta left the ring suspended between tedium and waiting.
The opening evening of San Isidro left an unsettling impression: high expectation, very little bull, and interminable faenas unable to manufacture emotion. Until Ganador appeared. A single true bull was enough to reorganise the whole meaning of the afternoon.
There is a moment when the Feria has not yet begun and yet already fills everything. Not the time of the bills, but another, vaguer one: that of an expectation building itself, like a ring still in scaffolding, sustained more by what it promises than by what it offers.
There is a moment, a few days before a feria begins, when nothing has happened yet and, nevertheless, everything is already there. The bills have been made public. The names are set in black on white. The combinations, decided. Time
Beyond the ferias · Madrid, Nîmes, Valladolid
The anthem played before an empty royal box. Then came the wind, the lightning and the deluge. The 2026 Beneficencia will not be remembered for the triumphs, but for a lesson in professionalism when everything advised suspending the corrida.
More than sixty thousand spectators, an entire city given over to its Roman arena and a feria able to survive even Morante's absence. Nîmes 2026 confirmed that bullfighting can still function as a living, intense and contemporary cultural phenomenon.
We had come from Madrid to see Morante de la Puebla. But the gorings in Seville turned Valladolid into something else: a corrida shot through with the sense of substitution. Sometimes an absence weighs more than everything that happens in the ring.
The gaze, outside the calendar
More than sculptures, they seem outcrops of the landscape. As if they had sprung from the earth itself. Before them, the question is no longer what they represent, but what remains alive in them after more than two thousand years.
Bullfighting does not happen “in” time: it works with it. Against the immediate, violent time of the bull, the bullfighter introduces another temporality: temple. It is not about fighting slowly, but about tuning two incompatible times during an unrepeatable instant.
The artist bullfighter does not show what he does. He shows what he can do. And he shows it, paradoxically, by not doing it. True power does not need to deploy itself continuously: it can remain still, contained, at rest.
There is a silent demand that runs through our age: that everything be good for something. But art — when it truly is art — is good for nothing.
There is no need to rush to defend bullfighting from the scandal it provokes. On the contrary: one must linger in it, even inhabit it — for in that discomfort lies the sign that something essential is at stake.
There is an age —a rare one— in which the bullfighter, when everything seems lost, begins at last to fight. Not better in terms of execution: better in terms of truth.
Terms under a slow gaze, letter by letter
Each term of the bullfighting vocabulary is an open door to an experience that never lets itself be fully captured. This dictionary does not aim to order that world, but to feel its way through it.
Each term of the bullfighting vocabulary is an open door to an experience that never lets itself be fully captured. This dictionary does not aim to order that world, but to feel its way through it.
Ballpoint drawings, along the season
Some bullfighting expressions describe a technique and yet contain a philosophy of the body. Cargar la suerte is one of them: the instant when the torero steps forward, commits his body and accepts the weight of the charge before letting it pass. A ballpoint drawing of the secret architecture of a verónica.
This gaonera reproduces no pass actually seen, but a form that time threatens to erase. The bullfighter carries the bull, hands low behind his back: drawing as a way of preserving toreo.
The embroque: the instant in which two different forces come to meet. Where writing no longer suffices and the hand goes on thinking in pen.
A sketch taken in the stands, in ballpoint: the bull does not lower its head, but neither does the bullfighter stand firm. Drawing and words from the same hand that watches.
Reviews without complacency
There are books that come not to explain anything, but to restore a difficulty. Alfonso Verdoy Blanco's belongs to that rare species: it does not seek to settle the problem of bullfighting, but to return it to its natural place,
There are essays that do not seek to add arguments, but to restore an evident truth that, through wear or fear, has ceased to be visible. Javier García Gibert's belongs to that lineage. It does not come to defend bullfighting
Why was the bullfighter the last hero of Spanish literature? The reissue of Alberto González Troyano's essay recovers an indispensable classic for understanding not only the history of bullfighting narrative, but also the contemporary crisis of the figure of the hero.