Anti-bullfight activists accidentally vandalise Madrid statue of penicillin inventor Alexander Fleming
Sir Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered the antibiotic potential of penicillin, is the latest and most unlikely target of the wave of attacks on statues and monuments around the world in the wake of the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a presumed case of mistaken identity, a statue of Fleming in Madrid was spray-painted with the word “murderer”, despite his name being synonymous with a medical discovery that has saved the lives of millions.
The statue is situated next to Madrid’s Las Ventas bullring, and consists of a matador doffing his cap to the Scottish scientist, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 and was greeted as a hero on a lecture tour in Spain three years later.
Dr Fleming is well known in Spain and many towns and cities have roads or squares named after him, but he is particularly revered by bullfighters, who often suffered severe and even fatal infections from goring wounds.
It is thought that the vandals presumed the statue was to honour a bullfighter, despite standing on a plinth that says “To Dr Fleming, with gratitude from bullfighters”.
“He only discovered penicillin, which does not cure stupidity”, said Andrea Levy, Madrid city hall’s head of culture, in a post on Twitter, adding that the graffiti had been cleaned off on Tuesday.
A monument in Palma, Mallorca to Saint Junípero Serra - a Spanish Franciscan friar and priest who converted many Native North Americans to Christianity in 18th-century California - has also been vandalised.
A Left-wing Mallorcan politician criticised the existence of a monument to a man accused by his detractors of forming part of a genocidal campaign against Native Americans after statues of Saint Junípero Serra were also targeted in the US.
Last weekend activists in Barcelona started a fire at the base of the city’s large monument to Christopher Columbus after the city’s mayor, Ada Colau, said she was against a campaign to remove the statue, arguing instead for the need to explain and contextualise it as part of Spain’s colonial-era history.
Countering the campaign by Left-wing Catalan groups to remove the figure of Columbus from his position of honour at the start of Barcelona’s famous Ramblas boulevard, hard-Right Spanish nationalist party Vox staged a rally to “protect” the monument on Saturday, with around 150 supporters encircling the structure with Spanish flags.
“This is our history and Spanish nationality. Hands off Columbus!” said local Vox leader Joan Garriga.
