“Anti-Bullfighting City” Campaign gets Hotel Manager dismissed…

The general manager of the Hotel Vila Galé Atlantico in Albufeira was dismissed from her post, after a confrontation an animal activist, Miguel Moutinho, President of Animal who together with the League Angainst Cruel Sports, are adopting a new strategy to achieve the abolition of bullfights in Portugal, through international economic pressure associated to tourism, so that 10 Algarvian municipalities officially declare their cities and towns as anti-bullfighting and so that the regional governmental authorities make the Algarve an anti-bullfighting region.

The target Councils of the campaign are Portimão, Lagos, Lagoa, Aljezur, Silves, Albufeira, Faro, Loulé, Olhão and Tavira, as in these localities, according to the organisation in a communication, tourism – especially British – assumes a vital economic importance, the reason for which they were strategically chosen as a collection of targets for this new campaign.

The idea is to lead these tourists to contact the authorities of these municipalities and request their Presidents to officially declare the cities or towns which they administer as anti-bullfighting cities or towns, under threat that if they do not do so, these tourists will not return again.

For Miguel Moutinho, President of ANIMAL, “this is the start of the end of bullfights. Actually, it will be impossible to make Parliament prohibit the bullfights; but it is perfectly possible for a collection of municipalities to prohibit them locally. In truth, it is in the interests of these municipalities and of the population of the councils who administer them to take this political decision. If we consider the case of the Algarve in particular, this is a region which has the urgent economic and promotional necessity of creating a non-bullfighting region.