The Plaza de Toros and the Arena Cañaveralejo are two spaces in a single ‘venue’. With a capacity of about 17,000 people, it has become the most important venue for concerts and bullfights on the west coast of Colombia.
The Plaza de Toros was inaugurated in 1957 and the most illustrious bullfighters in history have passed through there, such as Manuel Benítez ‘El Cordobés’, Francisco Rivera ‘Paquirri’, César Rincón, among others.
The Plaza de Toros was remodeled and conditioned with a million-dollar investment and thus the Arena Cañaveralejo was born in 2020, but due to the pandemic it had to wait until 2023 to start receiving some of the main names in Latin music.
LA PLAZA DE TOROS CAÑAVERALEJO
The venue is a testimony to an avant-garde proposal that for a long time was considered a revolutionary architectural approach.
It has documentary value in that, although its appearance is as sober as a bullring conceived in modern times, it entails a complex and innovative structural conception not only for the time but also today.
Plaza de Toros is a fundamental part of the Cali Fair, in the collective imagination the bullring is the Fair, the joy, the revelry: in a happy and tropical city like Cali.
Aesthetic Values
They have a deliberately modern character in that they provide an original solution consistent with the principles of modernity, beauty and functionality, in which form follows function, in a building that clearly expresses its character and the nature of its use: its image is clearly that of a bullring.
Symbolic value
The Plaza de Toros Cañaveralejo represents the contents of a tradition associated with a bullfighting festival loaded with customs of a long ancestry, whose practice can be found in its most primitive form in ancient Mediterranean civilizations, in the persistence of a hobby that occupied all the main squares of the Ibero-American cities and towns for the celebration of the “on foot and on horseback” festivals that in the city of Cali, as in Bogotá, Cartagena, Medellín or Manizales, maintained the tradition not only as a hobby of bullfighting, but also as an opportunity for the meeting and gathering of friends of the bullring is sober, without ornaments or stereotypes a certain social group.
