[imagesource: Samuel Antonio Galindo Campos/AFP/Getty Images]

Each year, a bullring is erected to celebrate Corralejo or the Feast of Saint Peter, a traditional Spanish bullfighting spectacle in the small Colombian town of El Espinal.

Thousands of people had gathered on the stands surrounding the ring on Sunday to watch the spectacle when suddenly, three levels of stands gave way in one section.

The tragic stand collapse was caught on drone footage, showing the falling wood and bamboo structure, trapping hundreds of people and children.

The town’s mayor, Juan Carlos Tamayo, said 800 spectators were seated in the collapsed sections.

Out of those, ABC News reported that at least six people died and more than 300 were injured after the horrible accident, with 10 of the injured in serious condition.

Watch the tragedy unfold:

The Washinton Post has a witness on the ground describe the scene:

Hector Ortiz, 64, could not believe the scene. A woman next to him shouted “That balcony is about to fall down!” and he watched eight sections begin to cave in one after another, like dominoes.

“After the first balcony collapsed, it pulled the next one, and so on, and so on,” Ortiz told The Washington Post. “It was the gate the bulls go through that stopped the collapse. Otherwise we’d be talking about a much bigger tragedy.”

The reason for the collapse is still unconfirmed but one can assume it has to do with the massive crowd putting pressure on the bamboo structure.

As Luis Fernando Velez, head of the regional civil defence agency says, organisers should have known that something like this would happen as “a gadua (the type of) bamboo structure is pretty unstable”:

A 14-month-old baby was among the dead. More than two dozen children were injured, and others were missing, having been beside their parents at the bullring when the structure gave way, Velez said.

The ethics of bullfighting has been thrown into question many times over the years, with people pleading for the tradition to be banned entirely and for the violence towards animals and people to stop.

Now you can add another tragedy to the bullfighting list.

[sources:washingtonpost&abcnews]