Antonio Ordóñez

Antonio Ordóñez (born February 16, 1932, Ronda, Spain—died December 19, 1998, Sevilla) was a Spanish matador, generally considered to be the first-ranked bullfighter of the 1950s and ’60s.

Antonio Ordóñez was the son of Cayetano Ordóñez, called “Niño de la Palma,” who was the prototype for Pedro Romero, the matador in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway is said to have ranked the son even higher than the father. Carrying on the tradition, Antonio’s grandson, Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, became a matador in 1996; he was the son of “Paquirri,” who was killed by a bull in Poziblanco, Spain, in 1984.

Antonio Ordóñez became a matador in 1951 and fought more than 2,000 bulls before his retirement in 1971. He was married to the sister of his greatest rival in the arenas, Dominguín. In 1959 Hemingway chronicled their ongoing competition in a series of articles for Life magazine that was later published as The Dangerous Summer (1960).