Osborne bull

Silhouette of an Osborne bull near Llanes , Asturias

The Osborne bull ( Spanish : Toro de Osborne ) is the silhouette of a bull . It was originally planned as a large billboard on Spanish streets to advertise the Osborne Group's Brandy Veterano . Over time, it developed from a trademark into a national symbol of Spain. The Osborne bulls encountered today no longer have any advertising lettering. They are approximately 14 meters high, consist of 70 sheet metal plates and have an area of approximately 150 m² with a weight of approximately four tons.

Similar bulls from the Osborne group, albeit with the name of the brandy Magno , can be found on Mexican streets.

history

In 1956, the Azor advertising agency was commissioned by the Osborne Group to design a symbol to represent the Brandy Veterano on billboards. The artist Manolo Prieto , then an employee of the agency, then suggested the figure of a wild bull, which is still used today. In May 1957 the line-up of the figures began. They were four meters high, made of wood, had white horns and were labeled Veterano . Since the original wooden figures could not withstand the weather, they began to be made of metal in 1961 and they were enlarged to seven meters in height. After a new law was passed in 1962 that required advertising signs on country roads to be at least 125 meters away from the road, the company reacted by increasing the size of the bulls to 14 meters.

The General Road Act (Ley General de Carreteras) passed in July 1988 called for the dismantling of all billboards within sight of state roads, including the Osborne bulls. The direct reaction to this was the removal of the lettering with the brand name from the exhibitors. The dismantling of all bulls was issued in 1994 in an ordinance. Various autonomous communities , numerous municipalities, cultural associations, artists, politicians and journalists spoke out in favor of preserving it. The Junta de Andalucía applied for their classification as a cultural asset, the Comunidad Foral de Navarra advocated a state law for the preservation of bulls. In December 1997 the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that the Osborne bulls should be retained. The grounds of the judgment stated that the exhibitors had more than their original advertising character and had meanwhile been integrated into the landscape, so there was an “ aesthetic or cultural interest” in their retention.

Today there are over 80 bulls on Spain's country roads.

The Osborne bull today

Osborne bull on Spanish flag

the Catalan donkey

Today, the image of the bull can also be found in various forms outside of its original advertising purpose, e.g. B. on bumper stickers, souvenirs and Spanish flags .

In addition to its promotional and tourist-folkloric use, the Osborne bull - especially in connection with the Spanish flag - is also used as a distinguishing mark by Spanish centralists , which has led to a political and symbolic charge of the bull and, as a result, to an open rejection of the sign in republican / left-wing circles and regions with pronounced regional nationalism . In 2009, the last bull still erected in Catalonia at El Bruc was destroyed by Catalan nationalists after it had already been the target of vandalism on several occasions. In recent years - partly in an ironic reference to the bull, partly in a polemical rejection of it - various regional symbolic animals have emerged that are enjoying increasing popularity in the form of stickers, printed T-shirts and the like: the Catalan donkey , the Basque sheep and the Galician cow .

distribution

There are currently 88 bulls unevenly distributed across Spain. While some autonomous communities have no bulls (Catalonia, Cantabria , Ceuta, Melilla and Murcia ) or only one bull ( Balearic Islands , Canary Islands , Navarre and the Basque Country ), some provinces have eight alone, such as Alicante and Cádiz . Below is a table with the distribution among the individual autonomous communities:

Autonomous community	number
Andalusia	21st
Aragon	6th
Asturias	5
Balearic Islands	1
Ceuta	0
Canary Islands	1
Cantabria	0
Castile-La Mancha	13
Castile and Leon	13
Catalonia	0
Extremadura	5
Galicia	5
Madrid	2
Melilla	0
Murcia	0
Navarre	1
La Rioja	2
Valencia	12
Basque Country	1
Total	88