A goring has broken the face of José Antonio Morante de la Puebla (La Puebla del Río, Seville, 46 years old) in one of the happiest moments, without a doubt, of his already long professional career.
This Monday he arrived at the Plaza de La Maestranza with a smile on his lips, ready, surely, to revive old images of the oldest bullfighting again, but a bull crossed his path, ran over him violently and the bullfighter’s happy expression became dramatic and painful. Clandestinenumber 178, with a chestnut coat and weighing 512 kilos, belonging to the Hermanos García Jiménez ranch in Salamanca, had broken it inside when he tried to stop it with the coat.
The square was silent; The bullfighter was taken to the infirmary and an endless wait began until, after ten at night, the medical report signed by Octavio Mulet, chief surgeon, confirmed the extreme seriousness of the fuck.
This afternoon Morante himself declared to the Canal Sur TV cameras that this had been the most painful goring of his life. “I was in immense pain and, in addition, very afraid because I saw that the bull had picked me up and I thought I was bleeding; when I got to the infirmary and saw that the bleeding was little, I relaxed, but it did hurt a lot.”
With unusual speed, the news spread like wildfire throughout the bullfighting world; Not in vain whoever was on the operating table was a special character, the most outstanding bullfighter today and one of the greatest in history.
Now, there are many questions that arise regarding his immediate future: the recovery time, whether or not he will be ready for his next committed celebration, on May 10 in Valladolid, how this accident will affect his spirit and, even, if this fuck could be decisive in putting a definitive end to his career as a bullfighter.
The truth is that what happened this Monday in the Sevillian plaza was not in the script; neither in the minds of the spectators nor in that of the bullfighter. Perhaps, because today’s bull has lost respect, and its leading role in this festival has been relegated to that of a mere troupe. But Clandestine He claimed his place and has broken, without knowing it, the protocol of passion.
Because that, an excessive passion, is what drives this man, revered as a brilliant artist, who, being a veteran bullfighter – 28 years since he took the alternative in Burgos in 1997 – has managed to reconvert himself as the great novelty of bullfighting in the 21st century, the one who fills the plazas as soon as his name appears on the posters, the one who has mobilized the youth, who has the fans in love and the new and numerous ones surprised. batch of generous spectators.
Paradoxically, this goring adds an epic chapter to his brilliant service record, and will serve to enhance the figure of a bullfighter revived after his frustrated farewell on October 12 in the Plaza de Las Ventas, staged with all solemnity, and soon forgotten as soon as the new Sevillian businessman, José María Garzón, seduced him with the question of what will become of bullfighting without you…
Be that as it may, José Antonio Morante Camacho, son of a humble family from the Sevillian town of La Puebla del Río, recently divorced for the second time and father of three children, is a being born for the bull, and already, as a child, he played in the street dreaming of glory with his cousin Juan Carlos, his lifelong swordsman.
He surprised from the beginning, before he debuted as a bullfighter in 1994 and was taken over by Leonardo Muñoz, father of the bullfighter Emilio Muñoz. But his career has not been easy. He took the alternative away from La Maestranza, in the Plaza de Burgos on June 29, 1997, he returned to Seville two years later and left a brilliant letter of introduction: he left on his shoulders through the Puerta del Príncipe on April 19, 1999; But what seemed like a brilliant career to stardom suddenly stopped and the young bullfighter was forced to make a long journey through the desert.
Fortunately, he was not a bullfighter who was very punished by the bulls. The most important were the one he suffered on April 29, 2000 in La Maestranza when a Victoriano del Río bull caused muscle damage to his left thigh; another in August 2009 in El Puerto on the right thigh; in Huesca, in 2013, and in Pontevedra on August 10, 2025.
Morante has always been a bullfighter with extensive knowledge of technique, but also irregular and inconstant: he has always had, of course, the approval of knowledgeable fans, but, for years, his star was far from the light of the great figures.
Thus, until in 2004 he summoned the media in Seville and surprised them with the news that he was suffering from serious psychological problems and that he would travel to the United States to undergo electroconvulsive therapy treatment (commonly known as electroshock).
That was his first retirement from the ring, but that announcement contained something more: it completely changed the public perception of his figure, and that illness, which he still carries, has been and continues to be the main protagonist in his career.
Three years later, in 2007, he hung up his light suit again because, as he said, he had lost his hope after cutting off a single ear in a bullfight with six bulls in Madrid; and in 2017, another momentary farewell “because presidents and veterinarians have bored me.”
Little by little, José Antonio Morante was clearing the vertices of a complex personality; a taciturn, fickle, bohemian human being, of few and sententious words, in permanent struggle with psychic ghosts that have forced him to undergo long and harsh medical treatments that have influenced his career and have saddened his face.
Rejection of modernity
He expressed these problems with crystal clarity in May 2021 in an interview given to this newspaper, in which he presented himself as a man from the 21st century locked in a lamp from the beginning of the 20th. He said that he longs for tradition, rejects modernity, admires Joselito el Gallo and his time, and that on the original desk of the king of bullfighters, that he keeps in his house in La Puebla, where books on bullfighting and philosophy rest. “I am a traditional man,” he said, “and this idea that the party has to reinvent itself seems horrible to me.” Then, he also explained his close relations with Santiago Abascal, president of VOX. “The political authorities have maintained an attitude of silence and apathy regarding the problems of bullfighting, which little by little has been losing importance. The ban in Catalonia is an example. The Constitutional Court cannot take seven years to decide whether bullfighting can be banned or not. Vox was born from the cowardice of the PP and to defend traditions; and I join them like someone who clutches at a burning nail.” He added that he did not consider himself a scholar to decide what is right or wrong, but “I do agree with the policy of containment that this party defends.”
On August 7, 2021, a momentous event occurred in his bullfighting life: with full capacity, he locked himself in El Puerto de Santa María with six bulls from Prieto de la Cal, a tough ranch far from the figures, and the experience was very negative. But what the collapse of his fragile spirit could mean served to vindicate himself as a figure.
At the San Miguel fair in Seville that year, a new bullfighter was reborn, excited, capable, committed, a full-fledged artist, who also triumphed in Madrid at the Autumn fair, days before he was awarded the National Bullfighting Prize.
The following year he triumphed again in Seville and Madrid and finished the season as leader of the rankings with 100 bullfights fought. And on April 26, 2023, he cut off both ears and the tail of the bull Ligerito from Domingo Hernández’s ranch in La Maestranza, which marked his consecration as a historical figure in bullfighting.
But the mental illness, the dissociative disorder he suffers from, was still on Morante’s mind, and in 2024 he was forced to suspend the season up to three times.
Advised by his close friend and attorney since 2021, the Portuguese dentist Pedro Jorge Marques, he underwent a new treatment in the neighboring country, and in March 2025 he acknowledged in an interview in Abc that he had thought of death as relief and that his illness was “complex, sad and painful.”
Despite everything, he reappeared that season in Seville, where he was the winner of the April Fair, he announced himself in San Isidro and he entertained himself in carrying out his most heartfelt task in this square, and days later, on June 8, he went out for the first time through the Puerta Grande de Las Ventas.
By then, José Antonio Morante had long been recognized as a myth, as a bullfighter from another dimension. And so he is, a revolutionary of modern bullfighting, a brave bullfighter and artist (“the most artist of the brave bullfighters, and the bravest of the artistic bullfighters”, the journalist Paco Aguado has written about him), a genius capable of moving, of enthusing and capturing in a brushstroke an anthology of bullfighting.
And on October 12, 2025, after another bullfighting exhibition, in the morning, at the festival in tribute to Antoñete, organized by him, and in the afternoon bullfight, he went to the center of the Las Ventas ring and, amid general surprise and wrapped in tears, he untied his ponytail and said goodbye to bullfighting.
That afternoon, bullfighting was left orphaned, and this is what Seville’s new businessman, José María Garzón, understood, who did not know how to organize a Seville Fair in 2026 without Morante’s name on the posters. He traveled to Portugal, where the bullfighter lived, later visited him several times at his farm in La Puebla, they ate and drank coffee several times, until Morante—without talking about money, the businessman says—gave his approval to reappear in Seville. “I just don’t know how to do anything else,” he then admitted to this newspaper.
It was announced four afternoons in the Sevillian season ticket, and on the 16th he drove the audience crazy with a master class on ancient and modern bullfighting. He did not leave through the Prince’s Gate because he failed with the sword and the Regulations prevented him from doing so. But it didn’t matter. His work had a very deep impact, and that is why he was awaited with so much expectation last Monday. So much so that no one thought about the bull, that protagonist relegated so many times to the role of extra and who broke the bullfighter’s face, turned his smile into a painful grimace and left a surprised bullring in silence.
It is the annoyance of a goring, inherent to the bullfighting festival.