



A bull injured forty people on Wednesday in Spain when it jumped into the stands to attack the crowd at a bullring in the northern town of Tafalla.

Raw video of the event posted online on Thursday showed the bull leaping over barriers and landing in the packed stands of the arena.

The bull was killed after it was subdued with the help of a former bullfighter in the crowd. Most of the injuries were cuts and bruises, but one man was gored in the back, another suffered crushed vertebrae and a 10-year-old boy remained in intensive care on Thursday at a hospital in the regional capital of Pamplona, the Spanish newspaper El País reported. The boy was injured when the 1,000-pound bull fell on him as it rampaged through the stands.

The Associated Press explained that the bull’s escape occurred Wednesday at the Tafalla arena in the northern region of Navarra, “during an event attended by about 3,500 spectators, in which mostly young people try to get a bull to charge at them so they can dodge it.”

A reader of The Lede writes from Barcelona to explain:

This was not a typical bullfight. In these types of corridas they do not kill the bull, nor do they harm it. The show consists of getting as close as possible to the bull, without getting hurt, somewhat similar to what is called “courses Landaises, ou Camarguaises” in France. This is called recortadores in Spain. The animals are not harmed in any way.

These spectacles sometimes feature acrobatic dodges of charging bulls, like the one seen in this short clip shot in Tafalla in 2006:

The bull’s leap into the stands on Wednesday in Tafalla, on its third attempt to do so, can be seen clearly in video from a Spanish broadcaster, embedded at the top of this post. El País also posted a series of large, dramatic photographs of the event, which convey the sense of the panic among the spectators.

Amateur video of Wednesday’s events, shot from the stands, shows the crowd apparently taunting the bull immediately before the incident:

Reflecting on the relatively small number of serious injuries, Tafalla’s mayor, Cristina Sota, told Diario de Navarra, a regional newspaper, “What could have been a tragedy ended up as a big fright.”

The event took place in a Spanish region best known for the annual Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, where a man was killed by a bull last year.