An account of the entrances and exits of both humans and bulls
El Ruedo
In everyday English people just say “the arena”, but in Spanish bullfighting language ruedo is the proper term for the circular performance space where the bull and bullfighter meet, as distinct from the surrounding tendidos (seating), barrera (barrier) and so on.
The sand used in the Seville Bullring, or Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla, plays an important role in the spectacle of bullfighting. The arena’s surface is carefully chosen for both tradition and practicality, affecting the movement of the bull and the matador’s ability to perform.
Typically a mixture of fine, compacted earth, clay, and sometimes chalk. This combination ensures that it provides a stable, firm footing while still allowing for slight shifts in the ground when the bull charges. The specific mix is designed to absorb the impact of hooves, cushion the blows between the bull and the matador, and absorb the blood from the animals. It also creates a visually striking contrast as dust is kicked up during the fight – a visual hallmark of the events, enhancing the dramatic atmosphere.
Maintained by a team of staff, it is regularly swept and sometimes watered to keep it in the right condition. The sand must retain its consistency throughout the event, as any sudden changes could affect both the bull’s behaviour and the matador’s performance. Extra sand is spread to cover the blood after each kill, and the surface overall may be raked and smoothed between fights to ‘reset’ the arena.
In bullfighting culture, the sand represents the brutal, ritualistic nature of the event. It’s not just a practical surface but part of the symbolic landscape of the fight, connecting the spectators to the physicality of the confrontation.
Puerta del Príncipe – The Prince’s Gate
Presenting the main Baroque façade to the river, with doors for the Maestranza nobles and civil authorities, the Prince’s Gate, is about rank, ritual and image. It states who rules the space, and who earns glory inside it.
The inner façade dates from 1765, built for the Bourbon prince Felipe, son of Felipe V. The upper gallery is the Royal Box (Palco del Príncipe), still used by the royal family. The half-dome roof, white and blue tiles, and sculpted group on the top mark it as the visual “crown” of the arena.
The lower part forms the main ceremonial gate into the arena. The Royal box aligns with the long axis of the ring, drawing the eye from almost every seat, and works as a “royal presence” even when no monarch sits there. The famous Puerta del Príncipe is the ritual exit that every matador wants.
The ears and tail are awarded to a matador by the president when urged by the crowd. Since 1982, a matador must earn at least three ears in one afternoon to leave by this gate. To raise the bar for ‘celebrity’ matadors, who fight alone, they must be awarded four ears. Matadors who achieve this leave on the shoulders of their cuadrilla and fans, through that door and out to the Paseo de Cristóbal Colón.
The Vomitoria
From the street, a set of main doors around the oval façade form numbered, ticketed entrances tied to a specific tendido (section), row and seat. Spectators enter into a covered inner gallery running all round the building, from which staircases and openings feed the seating tiers both above and below.
At the end of the corrida, stewards open the inner gates and the crowd drains down the stairs, through these galleries and out through the same numbered doors. The whole system is built for fast egress. In Roman theatres and amphitheatres, these passages and the flow of people was known as a vomitorium from the Latin vomere, “to spew forth”.
In design terms, their job is clear: to spew out twelve thousand people into the streets of Seville once the killing stops.
Puerta de Toriles – The Entrance of the Bulls
The toriles area sits on the side of the arena that faces the Prince’s gate and Royal box. The corrales, behind this are open pens where lorries unload the herd, and from which staff sort the bulls by ranch, carrying out veterinary checks before the fight. In front of the corrales, and next to the ring wall, are the chiqueros – narrow, dark boxes that hold each bull alone before its turn.
The Puerta de Toriles “por donde sale el toro a la plaza” – the one point where the bull can enter the ring links these chiqueros to the sand. There is a ritual built around this gate. At the start of the event, the alguacilillos on horseback ride to the president’s box to ask for the key. The president hands it down and the rider takes it to the torilero, to open the bull’s gate.
Puerta de Toriles – The Entrance of the Bulls – The Bull’s Eye View
It is a popular myth that bulls are colour-blind. However, bulls don’t see only shades of grey. They see fewer hues than we do, but they do not live in a grey fog.
Cattle have two cone types in the retina. Humans have three. This means that cattle see a blue and green spectrum, but they don’t see red in the way we do. A red cloth looks dark to them. It doesn’t blaze with heat or threat. The myth took hold because matadors move the cloth. The bull tracks the motion; the shade itself has no particular power.
This matters for two reasons. First, it shows how easy it is to frame an act of harm as a trait of the victim. The tale about bulls and red shifts blame. It hides the fact that people bait and break the bull through stress, pain, and fear. Second, it lets us ask how false ideas shape views of farm life and of the rights of non-human beings. If we treat beings as dull, we give cover to abuse.
For the animal, the shift is from a cramped dark box, through the Puerta de Toriles, to blinding light and noise. The whole design funnels that body, and the animal’s fear, to one exact point on the sand, while the crowd and the Royal box look on.
A historic study of the Maestranza notes the “zona de toriles”, with its own balcony of the Diputación set over the toriles gate, forms a clear axis – monarchy at one end, bulls at the other.
Puerta del Despejo – The Clearance Gate
We are told that the death of Victor Barrio in July 2016 was the first death of a matador since that of José Cubero “Yiyo” in 1985. However, matadors are the ‘nobles’ of the ring and there are also deaths (and, of course, injuries) among their team of banderillos and other ‘toreros’. Since modern era bullfighting emerged in 1700, there have been over 500 recorded deaths. In the last decade alone, there have been four reported (Victor Barrio – July 2016, Rodolpho Rodriguez – also in 2016, Iván Fandiño – June 2017, and Manuel Maria Trindade – August 2025). None of these figures and reports address deaths among farm workers outside the ring who are breeding and rearing the fighting bulls for much of the year.
Protection for the matador’s body, has changed little over the years. The traje de luces remains a tight silk suit tailored to show line and grace rather than padding. Some bullfighters wear light protection under the cloth, but culture still rewards a slim, ‘classic’ shape and the idea that the matador shares the bull’s exposure.
Modern rings try to answer the risk this represents with medicine rather than armour. Spanish law now calls for full medical cover inside the plaza. Big city rings market themselves as trauma centres. Pamplona, Madrid, Córdoba and Seville all house on-site infirmaries with operating theatres, teams of surgeons, and clear triage routes from sand to surgery.
The Puerta del Despejo had previously been used to drag out the bodies of dead horses, but the introduction of protective mantles reduced this need, and the gate was blocked up in the 1950s. However, when the new infirmary was created in the 2000s, it was reopened along with changes to floor levels so that the path from sand to surgery was uninterrupted – its name remains appropriate.
Puerta de Arrastre – the “Dragging Gate”
Once the bull lies still, ring staff check that it is dead. The president then calls the arrastre. A team of ‘mules’, the mulillas, come in from the patio through the puerta de arrastre, led by mulilleros in bright dress. They fix chains or a harness to the bull’s horns and set off at a brisk run. Normally, they drag the body in a straight line to the same gate. However, when the president grants a posthumous honour – a vuelta al ruedo – the team drags the bull round the full ring first.
Thus, the dead bull leaves the ruedo through the puerta de arrastre – a low but necessarily wider gate in the barrier that opens from the sand into the patio de arrastre – the service yard that links on to the skinning room and slaughter area – the desolladero. It is in this area that any bull that still shows signs of life is finally slaughtered, skinned and the body bled in hygienic conditions and under veterinary control before it is sent for butchery in refrigerated vans. The rules and processes were ‘tightened up’ in 2001, due to ‘Mad Cow Disease’.
Monument to Manolo Vázquez
Manolo Vázquez was Seville’s house matador. Born in the San Bernardo district in 1929, he took the alternativa in the Maestranza in 1951 and fought more than 300 corridas before his first retirement at 39 years old in 1968. He returned, at 50 in 1981, and said farewell for good in 1983 after a major ‘triumph’ in the same ring. He lived to 75, a long life in a trade marked by blood and shock. His bronze statue, opposite the Maestranza, shows him in a classic, calm pose with the muleta. Estimates vary, but he is thought to have killed between 300 and 500 bulls.
In a classic Spanish corrida, the bull enters the ruedo once and the script says that he must die there. A “fight to the death” is built into the form of the show and into law that still treats this as a set kind of public performance.
A bull that has fought cannot go back to farm life or face the ring again. The much-publicised “pardon” of an outstanding bull, the indulto, is a very rare exception that saves only a handful of animals each year and exists to feed breeding lines, not to soften the death rate.
The idea that rings sit on the edge of town so that loose bulls pose less risk is folk talk more than fact. Some old plazas did start at the fringe, but many, like Seville or Pamplona, now lie in dense city streets. A fighting bull that breaks out is very dangerous, as the death toll at street runs shows, yet the rule that the bull does not leave the ring alive comes from the needs of the show and the meat trade, not from a wish to protect the town.
In a standard corrida, three matadors face six adult bulls and all six are killed. At Seville, the 2024 and 2025 seasons listed 24 events each year – 16 or 17 full corridas plus a horse show and six novice fights – which means in the region of 140 to 150 bulls killed per season in this ring alone.
Across Spain as a whole, animal rights groups now speak of at least 7,000 bulls killed in official rings per year, and “tens of thousands” if one adds town fiestas and linked events.
