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Are bullfights art or animal torture? The long-debated question is making waves in Spain after one of the country’s regions started preparations to ban the centuries-old “national fiesta.”

Bullfighting has traditionally been regarded as an important part of Spanish culture, and thousands of bulls are still killed annually in spectacles in which the intelligence of a human being is seen as challenging the brute force of a beast.

However, the popularity of the corridas — the Spanish name for bullfights — is on the decline, especially among young people. About 70 percent of Spaniards prefer football or other pastimes, according to a 2006 poll.

Bullfighting critics say the industry leans heavily on subsidies. The Madrid region, for instance, grants millions of euros annually to the local bullfighting school as well as for the maintenance of bullrings, organizing bullfights and related activities.

Bullfighting had long been on the decline in Catalonia, a wealthy northeastern region of about seven million residents, where the regional parliament gave preliminary approval to a bullfighting ban in late 2009.

If the ban wins definitive approval, it would make Catalonia the first region to outlaw corridas on the Spanish mainland. Some Spanish analysts saw the Catalan bullfighting debate as being promoted by regionalists who rejected bullfights as an expression of a Spanish, rather than a Catalan, identity.

But the debate soon spread all over the country, with the Madrid, Valencia and Murcia regions announcing they would block any attempted bans with a countermove — declaring bullfights a part of their cultural heritage.

The three regions are governed by the opposition conservative People’s Party. Yet there is also support for bullfighting in regions governed by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialists, especially in the south, where hundreds of families breed fighting bulls for their livelihood

Corridas are an art form that “has belonged to Spanish and Mediterranean culture since time immemorial,” argues Esperanza Aguirre, Madrid’s regional premier whom critics accused of political opportunism in casting herself as a champion of Spanish culture

Bullfighting is “one of the most obvious displays of lack of ethics, apology of suffering, irrational aggression and contempt for life,” the environmental group Ecologistas en Accion counters.

The group vows to lodge an appeal against the move to declare corridas a part of Madrid’s cultural heritage.

The debate has engaged philosophers, environmentalists, bullfighting professionals, politicians, artists and others over a subject that has turned out to be intellectually complex.

Corridas represented “aesthetic emotion … a knowledge about living, with its danger and death, its joy of fighting and its tragic end,” poet Carlos Marzal wrote. The bullfight was a “primitive and tough” spectacle, but so was reality itself, he argued.

Animal rights campaigners, on the other hand, stress the suffering of the bull, which gets long darts pushed into its body before being killed with a sword.

“The authorities cannot allow an artistic or cultural expression which creates terrible and real suffering,” philosophy professor Pablo de Lora said.

The bullfighting lobby rejects such arguments, saying that raising bulls on vast fields maintains ecological spaces and guarantees a good life to the Iberian fighting bull, a race that only exists thanks to bullfights. Nobody understands the bull better than the matador does, the lobby says, arguing that the fighting bull is genetically programmed to die in the bullring.

Trying to save bulls or other animals from any suffering “devalued the human being,” philosophers Victor Gomez Pin and Francis Wolff wrote, while de Lora saw bullfights as violating compassion as the foundation of ethics. DPA