The sun has not risen yet over Garza, a tiny fishing village on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, but already there is movement. On one side of the town’s dirt road, the tide folds itself over the shore, and a monkey howls from behind the pink blossoms of a roble beech tree. On the eastern side, where pastureland stretches into to the mountains, two men on horseback are gathering the bulls.
Of all the bulls in Costa Rica, the most celebrated and revered is the bull people call “Malacrianza.” Translation? “Badass.”
“Ya! Asi!” one man urges from his horse as he chases a ghost-white Brahman bull from the pasture into a round paddock, where he will be kept with the others until it is time for the show.
Tonight — a Sunday night in March — the townspeople will empty out of the local Catholic church and congregate in a nearby field for an affair held in equal regard. They call it a corrida, which literally means, “run.” What it actually means here is rodeo — and these events largely resemble a typical American rodeo — but some people would call it a bullfight. They would not be entirely wrong.
Continue reading….from the Sbnation.com
