Aranjuez would be a fine place to see your first bullfight. It would be a good place if you were only going to see one bullfight, much better than Madrid, since it has all the color and picturesqueness that you want when you are still in the spectacle stage of appreciation. Later on what you will want at a bullfight, good bulls and good matadors being given, is a good public, and a good public is not the public of a one bullfight fiesta where every one drinks and has a fine time, and the women come in costume, nor is it the drunken, dancing, bull-running public of Pamplona, nor the local, patriotic, bullfighter worshippers of Valencia. A good public is Madrid, not the days of the benefit fights with elaborate decorations, much spectacle and high prices, but the serious public of the abonos who know bullfighting, bulls, and bullfighters, who know the good from the bad, the faked from the sincere and for whom the bullfighter must give his absolute maximum. The picturesque is for when you are young, or if you are a little drunk so that it will all seem real, or if you never grow up, or if you have a girl with you who has never seen it, or for once in a season, or for those who like it. But if you really want to learn about bullfighting, or if you ever get to feel strongly about it, sooner or later you will have to go to Madrid.
There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you were only going to see one and that is Ronda. That is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with any one. The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background and there is an hotel there that is so comfortable, so well run and where you eat so well and usually have a cool breeze at night that, with the romantic background and the modern comfort, if a honeymoon or an elopement is not a success in Ronda it would be as well to start for Paris and both commence making your own friends. Ronda has everything you wish for a stay of that sort, romantic scenery, you can see it if necessary without leaving the hotel, beautiful short walks, good wine, seafood, a fine hotel, practically nothing else to do, two resident painters who will sell you water colors that will frame as attractive souvenirs of the occasion; and really, in spite of all this, it is a fine place. It is built on a plateau in a circle of mountains and the plateau is cut by a gorge that divides the two towns and ends in a cliff that drops sheer to the river and the plain below where you see the dust rising from the mule trains along the road. The people who settled it when the Moors were driven away, came from Cordoba and the north of Andalucía, and the bullfight and the fair that starts the 20th of May celebrate the conquest of the town by Ferdinand and Isabella. Ronda was one of the cradles of modern bullfighting. It was the birthplace of Pedro Romero, one of the first and greatest of professional fighters and, in our times, of Nino de la Palma who started to be great but after his first severe goring developed a cowardice which was only equalled by his ability to avoid taking risks in the ring. The bull ring at Ronda was built toward the end of the eighteenth century and is of wood. It stands at the edge of the cliff and after the bullfight when the bulls have been skinned and dressed and their meat sent out for sale on carts they drag the dead horses over the edge of the cliff and the buzzards that have circled over the town and high in the air over the ring all day, drop down to feed on the rocks below the town.
There is one other feria with a series of bullfights that sometimes comes in May although the date is movable, and it may not come until June, and that is Cordoba. Cordoba has a good country feria and May is the best time to visit that city because of the heat that comes in the summer. The three hottest towns in Spain when the heat really comes are Bilbao, Cordoba and Sevilla. By hottest more is meant than mere degrees of temperature; I mean the heavy, airless heat of nights when you cannot sleep, nights when it is hotter than in the day, and no coolness to get to, Senegal heat, when it is too hot to sit in the café except early in the morning, too hot to do anything after lunch but lie on the bed in the room, dark from the strip of curtain pulled down over the balcony, and wait for the time for the bullfight.
Valencia is hotter in temperature sometimes and hotter in fact when the wind blows from Africa, but there you can always go out on a bus or the tramway to the port of Grau at night and swim at the public beach or, when it is too hot to swim, float out with as little effort as you need and lie in the barely cool water and watch the lights and the dark of the boats and the rows of eating shacks and swimming cabins. At Valencia too, when it is hottest, you can eat down at the beach for a peseta or two pesetas at one of the eating pavilions where they will serve you beer and shrimps and a paella of rice, tomato, sweet peppers, saffron and good seafood, snails, crawfish, small fish, little eels, all cooked together in a saffron-colored mound. You can get this with a bottle of local wine for two pesetas and the children will go by barelegged on the beach and there is a thatched roof over the pavilion, the sand cool under your feet, the sea with the fishermen sitting in the cool of the evening in the black felucca rigged boats that you can see, if you come to swim the next morning, being dragged up the beach by six yoke of oxen. Three of these eating shacks on the beach are named Granero, after the greatest bullfighter Valencia ever produced, who was killed in the ring in Madrid in 1922. Manuel Granero, after having 94 fights the year before, died leaving nothing but debts, the half-million pesetas he made all spent on publicity, propaganda, subsidies to newspaper men and taken by parasites. He was twenty years old when he was killed by a Veragua bull that lifted him once, then tossed him against the wood of the foot of the barrera and never left him until the horn had broken up the skull as you might break a flowerpot. He was a fine-looking boy who had studied the violin until he was fourteen, studied bullfighting until he was seventeen and fought bulls until he was twenty. They really worshipped him in Valencia and he was killed before they ever had time to turn on him. Now there is a pastry that is named for him and three rival eating pavilions Granero on different parts of the beach. The next bullfighter they got to worship in Valencia was called Chaves and he had well-vase-lined hair, a big face, a double chin, and a big stomach that he puffed out toward the bull as soon as the horns were past to give a sensation of great danger. The Valencians, who are a people who worship bullfighters, Valencian bullfighters, rather than enjoy the bullfights, were mad about Chaves for a time. As well as his stomach and his great air of arrogance he had a pair of gigantic buttocks which he threw out when he drew his stomach in and everything he did he did with great style. We had to watch him all through one feria. We saw him in five fights, if I remember correctly, and once of Chaves is enough for any one who is not his neighbor. But on the last fight while he was attempting to stab a big Miura bull somewhere, anywhere, in the neck, the Miura elongated that neck just enough to catch Chaves under the armpit and he hung a little and then made a big-stomached pinwheel around the horn. It took a long time to cure the tears and the destruction in the arm muscle and he is now so prudent that he does not even advance his stomach toward the bull after the horn is past. They have turned on him in Valencia now too, where they have two new bullfighters as idols, and the one time I saw him a year ago he was not so well fed looking as formerly and standing in the shade he began sweating the minute he saw the bull come out. But he has one consolation. In his home town of Grau, the port of Valencia, where they have turned on him too, they have named a public monument after him. It is an iron monument on the corner of the street where the tramcar turns that runs to the beach. In America it would be called a comfort station and on the circular iron wall is written in white paint, El Urinario Chaves.