Conchita Cintrón

The female bullfighter known as ‘the Blond Goddess’

Conchita Cintrón

1922–2009

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By the time she was 18, Conchita Cintrón was already famous as one of the few female bullfighters, or toreras, in the world. In the ring, she was as ruthless and fearless as any man. “I have never had any qualms,” she said. “A qualm or a cringe before 1,200 pounds of enraged bull would be sure death.” Known as “la Diosa Rubia”—“the Blond Goddess”—Cintrón killed some 750 bulls before retiring at the age of 27. She died last week of a heart attack.

Cintrón was born in Chile, the daughter of the first Puerto Rican graduate of West Point, said the Associated Press. Beginning at 13, “she learned bullfighting from Ruy Zarco da Camara,” a Portuguese who ran a riding school in Lima, Peru. To accustom herself to killing, she stabbed oxen in a slaughterhouse with a dagger. But as the animals bled and bellowed, she reflexively closed her eyes and so kept missing the kill zone, a small spinal gap behind the horns. As a reporter in Vogue later recounted, “She determined to kill that day’s six oxen with six strokes, keeping her eyes open, or give up bullfighting. She killed them each instantly, painlessly, and returned to Lima, singing.” There, she made her professional debut at 15.

Cintrón was perhaps the only bullfighter to combine the two main styles of the sport in the same fight, said The New York Times: “Spanish, in which the matador (or matadora in her case) is on foot, and Portuguese, in which the bullfighter is on horseback and known as a rejoneador, or rejoneadora.” As her fame grew, she became a media darling, often expounding on her technique. “The bull to a certain extent commits suicide when he charges,” she said. “There is a little spot just forward of the shoulders which is not exposed to the matador’s sword unless the bull is charging.” Though animal lovers reviled her, Cintrón was unbowed. “Would a bull who will be killed in the slaughterhouse by a hammer rather not die gallantly?” she asked.

Cintrón “had the ill fortune to be in the ring on three occasions when one of her fellow fighters was killed,” said the London Guardian. But she never flinched. “Her legend was sealed in 1940, when she was gored in Guadalajara, Mexico, collapsed, and was carried to the infirmary.” Upon regaining consciousness, she returned to the ring, killed the bull, and collapsed again. “She ended her career spectacularly in Jaen, Spain, in October 1950.” This was during the Franco regime, when women weren’t allowed

to fight bulls on foot, lest a goring leave them partially naked in public. But in the ring, Cintrón defiantly dismounted. Though she was arrested, the crowd cheered her so much that she was released. “In a sport dominated by masculine symbolism and macho ideology, and under a fascist dictatorship, she had struck a blow for women’s rights.”

“All my professional life I have been dominating bulls,” Cintrón said in 1949, “and I don’t want that to happen to the man I choose to marry.” Two years later she wed businessman Francisco de Castelo Branco, a big-game hunter and the nephew of her bullfighting mentor. Cintrón retired to Lisbon, Portugal, where she bred Portuguese water dogs.