Fiesta de los Toros in Giron Ecuador

This series of photographs, taken in the countryside of Giron in southern Ecuador, seeks to capture the life and essence of the intimate and almost inaccessible Fiesta de los Toros de Giron. The festival takes place every year in autumn and probably originates with the first Spanish domination. Every Sunday during the month of November, from 5am a rudimentary bullfight takes place in each of the few “haciendas” that simultaneously host the celebrations (Casa del Priosto). At the end of this bullfight the bull (or bulls) are sacrificed with the sole use of a knife. The animal's carcass is then skinned and cut into pieces in a sort of open-air slaughterhouse. The entrails and membranes are dried in the sun and in the air and then used as sacred ornaments for the Priosto and his wife in the ceremony that takes place in the late afternoon of the same day. The sacrifice of the bulls is accompanied by allegorical masks, music, dances and votive offerings. It is an occasion in which religious tradition and pagan rites merge and merge, in which life and death dance arm in arm and where a surreal sense of suspension and expectation restores the authentic atmosphere of the best magical realism of the South America by Garcia Marquez ..