Azpeitia: telling it how it was
For any aficionado visiting Azpeitia’s Feria de San Ignacio, the memories will be strong ones - the foreboding thick stone walls and narrow streets of the town; the politics of Basque voices and graffiti; and, amidst all this, a friendly welcome at the tiny bullring set amongst the green hillsides and the knowledge that the carteles will feature departures from the norm and sets of bulls from ganaderías that deserve to be seen more often.
Azpeitia kept los toros alive in terms of Basque culture during the long years in which San Sebastián lacked a bullring. And a national taurine critic who took the town to his heart at this time was Ignacio Álvarez Vara Barquerito, who became a champion of Azpeitia’s annual feria.
Last year, three of Barquerito’s friends - the screenwriter and film director Agustín Díaz Yanes, the Canal Toros commentator Maxi Pérez and the donostiarra Gerardo Cornejo Arruabarrena - decided that a collection of Barquerito’s articles on Azpeitia, written for the national newspaper Diario 16, should be republished in book form. Toros en Azpeitia is the result.
Covering the period 1985-1996, the articles are not pure crónicas of the festejos Vara witnessed (during this time, the feria grew from two novilladas and a corrida to the format of three corridas that continues to this day), but rather summaries of the events together with the historical context of Azpeitia and los toros and behind-the-scenes accounts of each feria.
Two individuals stand out, both matadores de toros - the No.1 figura of that time, Espartaco, and former matador and donostiarra José María Recondo. Despite his status and the relatively modest economic model on which the feria operates (it is run by a commission reporting to the local town council, and its profits go to the local Casa de Misericordia), Espartaco made a point of appearing at Azpeitia in six of the 10 ferias covered by the book, thereby bringing crowds up the mountain passes to the town. José María Recondo took the alternativa in 1956 and had a relatively short-lived career as a matador de toros, but, although a resident of Torremolinos, he worked closely with the authorities at Azpeitia on organisation of several ferias and appeared there in a festival homenaje in 1990.
As elsewhere, the feria at Azpeitia has changed over the years. This writer thinks nostalgically of the years in which San Ignacio featured toros of Ana Romero, Celestino Cuadri and Pedraza de Yeltes. Nowadays, the feria still offers Ana Romero bulls and also favours bulls of Murteira Grave; the carteles have become more commercial, with double appearances by the likes of Morante de la Puebla and Daniel Luque; the ganaderías are announced early in the year and the matadors singly in late April and early May. The town continues to provide opportunities for toreros off the main circuit - the 2024 feria includes appearances by Clemente, Borja Jiménez, Jesús Enrique Colombo and Jorge Martínez.
Toros en Azpeitia provides a record of how the feria was, and the personalities involved, from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties and is an indispensable book for any aficionado who has attended the Feria de San Ignacio or who wants to learn more about it.