Matador dies after being gored in ring

A matador has died after he tripped in a ring and was gored at a bullfight in the Landes departement of southwest France.

Ivan Fandiño, 36, was reported dead on arrival at hospital in Mont-de-Marsan , after falling over his cape, allowing the bull he was fighting to gore him during a fight in the ring at Aire-sur-l'Adour.

Fandiño, originally from Bilbao, was at the bullfighting festival in the town. Other famous toreros attending include Juan Del Alamo and Thomas Dufau.

He is the second Spanish bullfighter to die of wounds sustained in the ring in the past year, after Victor Barrio was gored in front of spectators last July. But he was the first bullfighter to die in France since 1921, when Isidoro Mari Fernando was killed at an event in Béziers.

While bullfighting in France is frowned on - the penal code recognises it as as a 'cruel act' that involves 'serious ill-treatment towards animals' - it remains legal as it is considered 'an uninterrupted local tradition'. Events still take place in the southwest of the country.

In April 2011, then-culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand officially and controversially included bullfighting in an official register of the country's cultural heritage known as the Inventaire du Patrimoine immatériel de la France. That decision was reversed four years later. In July 2016, the Conseil d'Etat rejected an appeal from two pro-bullfighting groups for it to retain its 'indefinable heritage status'. It also ordered them to pay €3,000 to two anti-bullfighting organisations.