At least four people were killed and hundreds more were injured after wooden stands full of spectators collapsed during a bullfight exhibition in the Colombian city of El Espinal on Sunday, the Colombian news website Noticias RCN reported Monday.
“[F]our people have died in this event: two adult women, a child under 14 months, and an adult man. There are approximately 16 people who are seriously hospitalized,” Tolima Gov. Jose Ricardo Orozco told reporters on June 26.
🇴 | ÚLTIMA HORA: Se desploma una parte de la plaza de toros de El Espinal en Tolima, Colombia. Al menos dos muertos y cientos de heridos. pic.twitter.com/Q5qMa5Mncq
— Alerta Mundial (@AIertaMundiaI) June 26, 2022
El Espinal is a city located in Colombia’s central Tolima state. Gov. Orozco said that eight separate seating sections in the multi-story spectator stadium collapsed on Sunday with an estimated 100 people inside each section at the time of the accident.
“[Approximately] 800 people fell,” Gov. Orozco estimated.
He added that roughly 270 people were treated for wounds in the local San Rafael hospital while an additional 60 people checked into other hospitals for their injuries.
The official death toll from the incident was either four or five, according to varying reports across Colombian media.
“I was in box 34 on the third floor, a very high part,” eyewitness and survivor Cristian Lozano, 33, told Colombia’s El Tiempo newspaper about his harrowing experience inside the stadium as it collapsed.
He described the wooden stands as reaching as high as four stories. The spectator boxes immediately surrounding Lorenzo held an estimated 200 fellow attendees when they began to “collapse” to the ground below, according to his account.
Lozano said he remembered that spectators “began to jump [in place]” en masse out of excitement moments before the wooden stands “also began to move.”
The man further revealed that the stadium structure was an “improvised bullring made of guadua [bamboo] and ropes.”
“Tons of guadua [bamboo], wood and zinc cans fell on me. I don’t know how many people died, but I did see many people crushed under the rubble,” another survivor of the incident named Fabio Buitrago, 35, told El Tiempo.
A government official in El Espinal named Ivan Ferney Rojas told the newspaper that recent heavy rains had possibly weakened the ground supporting the bullring’s wooden spectator stands.
“[W]e could believe that due to the action of the rains, part of the land where it was built possibly gave way,” he postulated.
El Tiempo published a separate article on June 27 in which it analyzed several eyewitness videos of the bullring collapse shared on social media.
“In the videos you can see that the grandstand was made of guadua [bamboo] and wood,” the newspaper concluded.
The bullfight in El Espinal was part of a nationwide festivity honoring the Catholic St. Peter, or “Festival Nacional de San Pedro” in Colombia.
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