Toreo faces waning interest and animalrights activists.


BARCELONA - Here in Catalonia, this persistently separatist-minded region of Spain, bullfighting has been in trouble for ages. And the economy hasn’t helped. Ticket prices are akin to opera’s. Fights are expensive to produce. The number of bullfights plummeted across Spain this year.

But Jose Tomas still draws enormous crowds. For aficionados, he is the last best hope for toreo, as bullfighting is called. Reclusive, a matador of unearthly fearlessness and calm, he retired in 2002, at 27 and the height of his fame. He returned unexpectedly five years later in Barcelona for what turned out to be the first sellout in 20 years at the 19,000-seat Plaza Monumental, this city’s bullring.

On September 27 he was back, for another special occasion: perhaps the last bullfight ever in Catalonia.

Over the last three decades or so, dwindling interest among young Catalans has combined with pressure from animal-rights advocates and from Catalan nationalists to cripple toreo in Catalonia. Across the region’s four provinces, bullrings have closed; Barcelona’s is the only one still active.

Now a referendum before the Catalan Parliament would end bullfighting here altogether.

So Jose Tomas’ corrida was more than just the last bullfight of the season. It was possibly the end of an era. And Jose Tomas (Jose Tomas Roman Martin, but everybody knows him by his first name) had come to lend his artistry to the anti-ban side.

Bullfighting is a matter of Spanish cultural patrimony, fans say. Europe may wish to come together around common interests, but national cultures must be respected.

Opponents see it otherwise. A dozen or so animal-rights protesters stood outside the arena that day.

“At a point when Europe is becoming bigger and more multicultural, Barcelona is becoming smaller and more Catalan,” is how Robert Elms, a British travel writer, saw the situation. The possible ban on bullfighting, he added, is akin to a law here requiring children to receive much of their education in Catalan, not Spanish.

Paco March nodded at the mention of that connection. A Barcelona native, he is the bullfighting columnist for La Vanguardia, the city’s second biggest newspaper.

“I feel rage that in the name of democracy,” Mr. March said about the pending referendum, “a minority of opponents of toreo could erase the rights of another minority, aficionados, who are enjoying what is in this country a legal spectacle that expresses deep truths about life and death taken to their extreme.”

While nearly three quarters of Spaniards say they have no interest in bullfighting, they’re loath to have foreigners tell them what to do.

And so, amid the bursts of flashbulbs and chants of “Torero!” and “Ole!” Jose Tomas appeared at least one last time in Barcelona. Like Roger Federer, he makes every move look impossibly slow and stylish.

“We want to be different from the rest of Spain by not killing bulls,” Mr. March said. “But we’re just killing off our own culture.”

CARLOS CAZALIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES / José Tomás, a star matador, in what may have been the last corrida in Barcelona, if bullfighting is banned.