Anti-Bullfighting City

The Anti-bullfighting City is a declaration of an ethics and policy statement adopted by the municipalities in which they do not support the realisation of bullfighting events in their county in any way and state that they are against the practice of bullfighting and in aid of the principles of the animal rights.

The concept of an anti-bullfighting city, however, is not forbidding the practice of corridas. For the same declaration to be adopted by local municipalities, associations and organisations that protect animals pursue their influence and pressure near the respective mayors in the sense that they declare their counties as an anti-bullfighting.

The manner of implementation of the campaigns is not necessarily equal in all countries. Each local organisation decides on the strategy that they prefer to use, always taking the different political aspects into account. One of the strategies adopted by some campaign organisations is also raising awareness among tourists who visit cities with bullfighting traditions, to exert economic pressure as a factor dissuator and penalises of bullfighting.

The first town to adopt the concept of anti-bullfighting city was Tossa de Mar in Spain, in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia in 1989 by then mayor, Telm Zaragoza, making it the first anti-bullfighting city in the world.

The council then was in a climate of political unrest and challenges from various entities for the protection of animals against a councilman in the region, who argued that it was necessary to promote bullfighting, because the tourists only found the tradition in the Catalan culture. This resulted in conditions that were created to initiate the movement.

The mentor of the implementation of the concept was Pilar Taberner at the time, a member of the environmentalist party "The Greens" from Spain and who has started a series of contacts for the creation of an international movement against bullfighting nine years earlier, that proposed to the then Mayor of Tossa de Mar, Telm Zaragoza to declare Tossa de Mar anti-bullfighting.

Before, in 1988, Pilar Taberner was present for the realisation of an international conference in Gijon, in the north of Spain, with the participation of entities from several countries to find a way together to combat bullfighting and where the first idea of asking the Spanish mayors to declare their cities as anti-bullfighting came up.

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Wikipedia