Getting the flavor of...Spanish bullfighting’s last gasps

Spanish bullfighting’s last gasps

Love the spectacle or hate it, you’ll need a history book to see a bullfight in Catalonia if you don’t get to one this summer, said Catherine Nixey in the Financial Times. That thought makes me wistful as I sit in Barcelona’s stadium watching satin-clad matadors saunter to ring center. A regional ban on the sport will end this centuries-long tradition soon. Suddenly, the crowd around me falls silent as a matador’s blade, catching the afternoon sun, glitters above his head. But it’s a sparse audience, a far cry from those of the sport’s early-20th-century heyday, when sword-wielding heroes were “celebrated like gods and paid like footballers.” The first bull goes down, and I grow squeamish. Soon enough, though, I’m parsing the deadly dance maneuvers like a seasoned press-box analyst. When “the final bull sinks to the floor, the band play their final fanfare” and fans carry the matador away in triumph. My hope is that they encounter no protesters outside on the street.

Underground Paris

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Never say there’s nothing to Paris except surface pleasures, said Joshua Levine in WSJ. Magazine. “Down is the new up” in the City of Light, as locals and tourists are finding new ways to enjoy the underground maze of tunnels, caves, crypts, and abandoned quarries that lie below street level—sometimes far below. Visitors have long known about the catacomb museum beneath Denfert-Rochereau, a “Disneyland of death” where the bones of 6 million pre-19th-century Parisians are stacked like firewood. For decades, music fans have also gladly gone underground to visit Caveau de la Huchette, perhaps the oldest jazz club in town. But these days, it’s not unusual to hear about a party for 1,000 in a space 70 feet below the streets, or a restaurant serving guests in two levels of buried caves. Paris’s most intrepid spelunkers, known as “cataphiles,” treat the vast subterranean world as a playground. Happily, they’re “an amiable bunch” and are even welcoming to newcomers.