Morante on tour (VII): how to replace the irreplaceable bullfighter

** This summer, El Confidencial is publishing a series of chronicles that describe, from north to south, from east to west, the magical and triumphant season of José Antonio Morante de la Puebla. In this seventh installment of the tour, we travel to San Sebastián.

Ticket sales were flowing to see Morante in Donosti this Friday of Santa Canícula, but the setback of the goring in Pontevedra stopped the expectation of the poster in its tracks, as if the bullfighter of the future, Marco Pérez , and the new reference for the novilleras, Olga Casado , were mere extras of the maestro in the Semana Grande.

They both accepted the substitution and announced themselves as one-on-one at Illumbe, but it turns out Morante is... irreplaceable. Not only because we were facing the greatest bullfighter of all time, but because the limited capacity demonstrated the virtue and the problem represented by the idol of La Puebla: everything and nothing, in other words.

Morante has revolutionized bullfighting . He has awakened the fan base. He has encouraged conversions and initiates, but he has also created an unhealthy bond of dependency . He has taken bullfighting on his own shoulders. He has turned it into a personal mission, so that the magnitude of his absence is proportional to the categorical weight of his presence. And it's possible that he will reappear in Málaga on August 18 or 20, but business owners are desperate with the pace of his convalescence. They need him to fill the bullrings and the fairs. And they entrust themselves to the fanaticism that the Sevillian bullfighter engenders. We had Morante as a cult matador of minorities, as a singer from the Sacromonte cave and from Madrid's late-night scene, but the season of miracles that concerns us here implies and emphasizes the idolatry of a mass phenomenon.

The good news is that Morante is the figurehead of bullfighting, the helmsman of the cause in the most turbulent era. The bad news sends us into a void. It already happened with José Tomás during the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s. The impact of bullfighting was a personal matter, a virtuous and extreme example of identification. Morante is bullfighting itself. That's why there's no way to find anyone to replace him.

The formula chosen in San Sebastián was interesting because it announced the lineage of the heirs . Marco Pérez, who looks more like a child than a teenager, embodies the narrative of the chosen one: precocious, intuitive , with that ease only granted to those who bullfight as if they've always done so. And Olga Casado, a leading novillera, represents the other pending revolution: the emergence of women not as a media eccentricity, but as an artistic category . She doesn't fight "to be a woman," but to be a figure.

The mano a mano in Illumbe, Morante's orphan, was a dress rehearsal for what bullfighting could be like when the gods retire. And that is the paradox: the public, for the most part, did not come to see a rehearsal, but to celebrate Morante's liturgy. The emptiness in the stands underscored the addictive nature of the phenomenon. As if the Festival could not be sustained without the high priest, even though he had in front of him a 17-year-old boy capable of bullfighting like an old master and a woman who, with each pass, defuses centuries-old prejudices. Marco Pérez, bad with the sword, swift on his feet, proposed with the insolence that only innocence is permitted. He knows no fear because he has not had time to learn it , and his gestures seem a reminder that true art is not what is thought, but what is felt. Casado, on the other hand, faced the challenge like someone who has already seen adversity up close . Her value isn't just physical, but cultural: bullfighting as a woman involves fighting two bulls, one from the arena and one from suspicion. And she, as if aware that her battle is twofold, imposes a composure that is also a manifesto. She decisively killed the first of her lot—an ear—and delivered powerful, plastic passes with the sixth-place bull, living out the slogan of the bus that carried her name and her budding legend through the streets of San Sebastián : "You're young for a while, you're always a woman."

In a way, the poster without Morante was a metaphor for the bullfighting to come : a celebration sustained by emerging talents, by names still in the making, by the conviction that the next step exists even if it has not yet awakened the same fever as the Morante poison.

It's worth remembering that Morante is about to turn 46 and has already served 27 years as an alternative bullfighter. He could have retired, not to mention after having cut a tail in Seville or having—finally—opened the Puerta Grande in Madrid , but the 2025 season has affirmed his hegemony with more justification and values than ever before. He has never bullfought better, nor more slowly, nor with greater depth or courage . Nor with such consistency. Never before has he transcended the boundaries of society, politics, and culture. More than the complete bullfighter, Morante is the absolute artist.

The pace of its retreat , the anxiety of its reappearance, is necessarily noticeable. The trains have stopped. The cars have been parked. The hustle and bustle at the ticket counters has been cut short. The immediate question is an emergency: when will it reappear? The deeper and more disturbing question would then be: what will happen when it withdraws?

We know that the Morantist religion is dying. And that the Dionysian rhythm with which the maestro fertilizes the bullrings or turns them into wastelands when he's absent cannot be sustained in time or space. Marco Pérez and Olga Casado tried to propose solutions in their "torostiarra" duel—a fashionable neologism in the area—based more on willpower and voluntarism than on impact, although it was a merit to perform the parade in the Illumbe greenhouse. We seemed to be in a sociological experiment . Because of the humidity. Because of the temperature. And because the ring, yellowish and languid, resembled a Saharan journey in subhuman conditions.

The conditions were ripe for a mirage to appear, but Morante only appeared in the form of an absence. The afternoon in Illumbe had that murmur of a port without ships, a church without parishioners, a theater without a leading actor. Morante was missing, and his absence wasn't a void: it was an inverted presence, a ghost with a reserved seat in each stand. Nothing was as loud as his silence. The procession continued as usual, the bugle sounded as always, but the air carried the invisible twist of the irreplaceable . San Sebastián lost the Plaza del Chofre and with it, lost its center of bullfighting gravity. That plaza, open to the Cantabrian Sea and fully immersed in Semana Grande, was part of the city without needing to announce itself. The bull was in the streets, in conversation, and in the natural path of the festivities. Its speculative demolition in 1974 not only eliminated a bullring: it expelled bullfighting from the daily map of the people of San Sebastián . Illumbe is something else. A peripheral, closed-off venue, removed from the festive pulse of the city and the sentimental geography that united fair and street. The plaza lives isolated, clandestine, without the sound of bands or the spontaneous flow of fans. The bullfight is held there, yes, but as if in an annex, in a space that seems temporary even though it has been standing for more than two decades. A displaced bullring that reminds us, every afternoon, of the absence of El Chofre, just as Morante 's hollow describes the abyss of his crater.