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Description
Fernando lives with his mother and other bulls in a dehesa in a small Spanish village. Unlike the other bulls who want to be the protagonists at the famous bullfights in Seville, Fernando likes to sit under his favorite cork tree smelling the sweet scent of the wild flowers. The original story by Munro Leaf was controversial in Francoist Spain: the Franco regime was suspicious of a pacifist bull who was happy smelling the flowers instead of training for the bullfights. The book was banned in Spain until the dictator’s death in 1975.
Geographical region for language spoken
Vigo, Spain
Disciplines
Language Interpretation and Translation | Spanish Literature
Recommended Citation
Leaf, Munro and Ferradáns, Carmela, "Spanish: La historia del toro Fernando-The Story of Ferdinand the Bull" (1936). IWU Global Storytelling Project. 9.
https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/globalstorytelling/9
Version
La historia del toro Fernando is based on Ferdinand, the Bull, written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson (Viking Press, 1936). The story of Ferdinand was a bestseller in 1936, surpassing Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell published in the same year. Walt Disney made an animated short film based on the story in 1938.
Comments
Read by Carmela Ferradáns, Professor of Spanish, Illinois Wesleyan University.
Illustration used for thumbnail created by Laura Ferradáns Rodríguez.
About the Spanish language in Spain: Spanish, also called Castilian in Spain, is the official language of the Spanish State. Spanish is one of five languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, together with Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese.