A goring has broken the face of José Antonio Morante de la Puebla (La Puebla del Río, Seville, 46 years old) at one of the happiest moments, without a doubt, of his already long professional career.
This Monday he arrived at the La Maestranza bullring with a smile on his lips, ready, surely, to revive old images of the most ancient bullfighting, but a bull crossed his path, violently ran him over, and the bullfighter’s cheerful expression turned dramatic and painful. Clandestino, number 178, with a chestnut coat and weighing 512 kilos, belonging to the Salamanca ranch of Hermanos García Jiménez, had broken him inside when he tried to stop it with the cape.
The bullring fell silent; the bullfighter was transferred 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 goring.
This midday Morante himself declared to the cameras of Canal Sur TV that this had been the most painful goring of his life. “I had immense pain and, furthermore, a lot of fear because I saw that the bull had lifted me up and I thought I was bleeding; when I arrived at the infirmary and saw that the bleeding was little, I relaxed, but it did hurt me quite a lot.”
With unusual speed, the news spread like wildfire throughout the bullfighting world; not in vain, the person on the operating table was a special figure, the most outstanding bullfighter of today and one of the greatest in history.
Now, many questions arise regarding his immediate future: the recovery time, whether or not he will be ready for his next committed bullfight, on May 10 in Valladolid, how this accident will affect his spirits and, even, if this goring could be decisive in definitively ending his career as a bullfighter.
The truth is that what happened this Monday in the Seville bullring 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 fiesta has been relegated to that of a mere extra. But Clandestino reclaimed its place and, without knowing it, broke 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 reinvent himself as the great novelty of 21st-century bullfighting, the one who fills the bullrings as soon as his name appears on the posters, the one who has mobilized youth, who has captivated fans and surprised the new and numerous wave of generous spectators.
Paradoxically, this goring adds an epic chapter to his brilliant service record, and will serve to magnify the figure of a bullfighter revived after his frustrated farewell on October 12 in the Las Ventas bullring, staged with all solemnity, and soon forgotten as soon as the new Seville 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 alongside his cousin Juan Carlos, his lifelong sword handler.
He surprised from his beginnings, before he debuted as a novillero in 1994 and was managed by Leonardo Muñoz, father of bullfighter Emilio Muñoz. But his career has not been easy. He took the alternative far from La Maestranza, in the Burgos bullring on June 29, 1997, returned to Seville two years later and left a brilliant calling card: he was carried out on shoulders through the Puerta del Príncipe on April 19, 1999; but what seemed like a dazzling career to stardom suddenly stopped and the young bullfighter was forced into a long journey through the desert.
Fortunately, he has not been a bullfighter heavily punished by bulls. The most important gorings were the one he suffered on April 29, 2000, in La Maestranza when a bull from Victoriano del Río caused muscle damage to his left thigh; another in August 2009 in El Puerto to his 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, however, had the approval of the knowledgeable fans, but, for years, his star was far from the light of the great figures.
Thus, until in 2004 he called a press conference in Seville and surprised them with the news that he suffered from serious psychological problems and would travel to the USA to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (commonly known as electroshock).
That was his first retirement from the bullrings, 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 a main protagonist in his career.
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Three years later, in 2007, he again hung up his suit of lights because, he said, he had lost his enthusiasm after cutting only one ear in a solo performance with six bulls in Madrid; and in 2017, another momentary farewell “because the presidents and veterinarians have bored me.”
Little by little, José Antonio Morante was clearing the corners of a complex personality; a taciturn, whimsical, 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 saddened his countenance.
Rejection of modernity
He expressed these problems with crystal clarity in May 2021 in an interview granted to this newspaper, in which he presented himself as a 21st-century man trapped in an early 20th-century lamp. He said he yearns for tradition, rejects modernity, admires Joselito el Gallo and his era, and that on the original desk of the king of bullfighters, which he keeps in his house in La Puebla, rest books on bullfighting and philosophy. “I am a traditional man,” he affirmed, “and that idea that the fiesta has to reinvent itself seems like a horror to me.” Then, he also explained his close relations with Santiago Abascal, president of VOX. “Political authorities have maintained an attitude of silence and indifference regarding the problems of bullfighting, which has gradually lost its essence. The prohibition in Catalonia is an example. The Constitutional Court cannot take seven years to decide whether bullfighting can be prohibited or not. Vox is born from the cowardice of the PP and to defend traditions; and I join them like someone grasping at a burning nail.” He added that he did not consider himself an erudite to decide what is right or wrong, but “I do agree with the containment policy that this party defends.”
On August 7 of that year, 2021, a transcendental event occurred in his bullfighting life: with a full house, he locked himself in El Puerto de Santa María with six bulls from Prieto de la Cal, a tough ranch far from the star figures, and the experience turned out to be very negative. But what could have meant the collapse of his fragile spirit served him to assert himself as a figure.
At the Seville San Miguel fair that year, a new bullfighter was reborn, enthusiastic, capable, committed, an artist in his prime, 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 the leader of the ranking with 100 bullfights fought. And on April 26, 2023, he cut two ears and the tail from the bull Ligerito from the Domingo Hernández ranch in La Maestranza, which marked his consecration as a historical figure of bullfighting.
But the mental illness, the dissociative disorder he suffers from, remained in Morante’s head, and in 2024 he was forced to suspend the season up to three times.
Advised by his close friend and manager 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 a 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, was announced in San Isidro and took his time performing his most heartfelt faena in this bullring, and days later, on June 8, he exited through the Puerta Grande of Las Ventas for the first time.
By then, José Antonio Morante had long been recognized as a myth, as a bullfighter of another dimension. And so he is, a revolutionary of modern bullfighting, a brave and artistic bullfighter (“the most artistic of brave bullfighters, and the bravest of artistic bullfighters,” journalist Paco Aguado has written about him), a genius capable of moving, thrilling, and capturing an anthology of bullfighting in a single brushstroke.
And on October 12, 2025, after another display of bullfighting artistry, in the morning, at the festival in homage to Antoñete, organized by him, and in the afternoon bullfight, he went to the center of the Las Ventas bullring and, amidst general surprise and wrapped in tears, untied his pigtail and said goodbye to bullfighting.
That afternoon, bullfighting was left orphaned, and the new Seville businessman, José María Garzón, understood this, not knowing how to organize a Seville Fair in 2026 without Morante’s name on the posters. He traveled to Portugal, where the bullfighter lived, then visited him several times at his farm in La Puebla, they ate and had coffee several times, until Morante —without talking about money, the businessman assures— gave his approval to reappear in Seville. “I just don’t know how to do anything else,” he then admitted to this newspaper.
He was announced for four afternoons in the Seville season ticket, and on the 16th he drove the audience wild with a masterful lesson on ancient and modern bullfighting. He did not exit through the Puerta del Príncipe because he failed with the sword and the Regulations prevented it. But it didn’t matter. His work resonated deeply, and that’s why he was awaited with such anticipation last Monday. So much so that no one thought of the bull, that protagonist so often relegated to the role of an 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 adversity of a goring, inherent to the bullfighting fiesta.
