How do they do it?

The initial results of the tender to manage Zaragoza’s La Misericordia bullring for the next four years have been announced. The minimum contractual payment was set at 182,500 euros for the 68 days’ rental of the plaza involved, the plaza remaining under the control of the local diputación for the rest of the time.

Ernst & Young described the contract - which required a minimum of two corridas for the San Jorge feria and six corridas, a rejoneo event and two novilladas for the Feria del Pilar - as a poorly drafted document, while Simon Casas said he regarded the tender as “speculative”: “I’ve had experience there, running four temporadas […] on a financial knife-edge, and, bearing that in mind, we must now add the current problem of the pandemic which shows no signs of disappearing from one day to the next. We need a period to recover stability and this type of contract does not help.” The Frenchman said he would not take part in the tender, regarding the alternative as involving “making a reckless offer”.

The empresas’ organisation ANOET and la Fundación del Toro de Lidia declined to make any pronouncement on the tender, which, in the end, attracted seven submissions, one of which was discounted for a failure to provide all the necessary supporting information.

Of the remainder, there was huge disparity between the amount of euros offered for the contract. Two tenders - one involving the experienced and not impoverished Bailleres family and Casa Chopera, and the other Alberto & Carmelo García - came in at the 260,000-euro mark. The next highest, just above 302,000 euros, was from Jesús Domínguez’s Espectáculos Montauro, followed by Nautalia (Casas’s partner in Madrid, but going it alone in this instance as they’ve done at Valencia) at some 374,000 euros and Carlos Zuñiga Jnr.’s Circuitos Taurinos at 423,500 euros. But the apparent winner is Carlos’s father, whose Zuñiga y Toros put in a further 78,650 euros to achieve a whopping tender price of 502,150 euros. Barring any last-minute problem with his tender, the Zaragoza ferias are his.

I’ll leave the last words to matador Miguel Ángel Perera, speaking generally: “Seeing the decisions that empresas make regarding tenders, I wonder: where’s the money? Because it’s difficult to imagine when, year after year, it’s said that the plaza concerned is in deficit. And if it is, I ask another question: why is three times the money requested by a plaza tender offered? Why are those exorbitant amounts put forward that then have an impact on the bulls, the toreros and the public? The empresas are the people who must take measures in the face of the abusive conditions involved in running bullrings, but we’re in the same situation where everyone does their own thing - this way of doing your own thing which we then all pay for, of course.”