Sincelejo Corralejas Festivities

Sincelejo Corralejas Festivities, centered on January 20th, involve a controversial tradition where local participants, not only professional bullfighters, enter a wooden arena to confront bulls brought in from the Montes de Maria countryside, alongside parades and vallenato concerts. The tradition survived a catastrophic 1980 grandstand collapse that killed roughly five hundred people and remains legally exempt from Colombia's national bullfighting ban, making it an actively contested event.

Sincelejo Corralejas Festivities center on corralejas, a controversial tradition that emerged in the early twentieth century in the Montes de Maria region, in which cattle farmers bring prized animals from the countryside to a purpose-built wooden arena and members of the public, not only professional bullfighters, enter to confront the bulls, often on horseback, in an event that combines the bullfighting-adjacent spectacle with days of music, dancing and community celebration.