In Las Ventas Tour we wanted to dedicate this article to one of the most significant places for all the bullfighting masters who pass through the Las Ventas Bullring. This is where reality finds a place between the divine and the mystical: It is about the chapel, a place of worship for all bullfighters.
Be in chapel
In Spain, being in the chapel represents the image of someone who prepares himself mentally and emotionally, very concentrated and isolated from everything around him, before facing a challenge or a test pending by fate. This phrase comes from a tradition of the old University of Salamanca, in which doctoral students, the day before defending their thesis before the tribunal, had to lock themselves away for a whole day in the chapel of Santa Bárbara. There they had to ask the Holy Spirit for enlightenment and prepare themselves in complete solitude. If we transfer this tradition to the Chapel of Las Ventas, we will understand this place, full of particularity, as a sacred space where the bullfighter, due to the usual confrontation with death, seeks a last minute of silence, of inner search and commends himself to his beliefs. This custom, which is tinged with ritual, is the previous instance before going out into the arena. It is a total act of intimacy, of concentration that is transformed into a final prayer to ask for a good bullfight and to leave the square on a platform through La Puerta Grande.
Architecture
This historic place of worship is preserved in a Mexican baroque style and presided over by a painting of the Virgin of the Dove, patron saint of the city of Madrid, and next to it, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, a country with a strong bullfighting tradition. Inside you can also find a multitude of prints that were left by the bullfighters themselves who passed through there. A curious fact is that the chapel is connected to the infirmary by a small back door that connects to a very short corridor, which gives a powerful symbolic charge to the place. They are 2 opposite rooms and a passage that no bullfighter wants to go through if the bullfight turns into a tragedy.
