JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA – Less than an hour before the start of his intended wedding, Spanish bullfighter Juan Ortega called his fiancée last Saturday to say that he had doubts about marrying her.
At that moment, the young cardiologist put the finishing touches to her outfit and the first of the 500 guests began to arrive at the wedding venue in a church in Jérez de la Frontera, the birthplace of bride Carmen Otte Alba. The wedding guests also included well-known faces, especially from the world of bullfighting, such as Curro Romero, Pepe Luis Vargas, Juan José Padilla, Morante de la Puebla, and Roca Rey.
The pre-marriage had already taken place on Friday in the presence of family and close friends. The couple had looked very happy during that party, according to several Spanish newspapers, based on sources from the close circle of both families.
“It’s not fair to hurt someone so much on what should have been a very happy day,” one guest said on social media. Many guests ended up having dinner in the centre of Jerez after it became clear that the wedding was cancelled. The guests were generally quite displeased. Ortega left for Seville, to the house he shares with the woman he was going to marry.
Disbelief
The ABC newspaper writes that the news has been a bombshell among guests, especially in the bride’s family. Who ‘can’t believe what happened’? The newspaper further reports that alarm bells had gone off when the bullfighter was tackled twice by a Huagrahuasi bull in the Ecuadorian bullring of Lacatunga two weeks before the wedding. He had to visit the infirmary where ‘serious bruises to the body and jaw, as well as the fracture of two teeth, were found’.
Desolate Carmen Otte Alba
Cardióloga y descendiente de bodegueros: así es Carmen, la novia a la que el torero Juan Ortega dejó plantada https://t.co/P0BF3Uu9VH
— EL ESPAÑOL (@elespanolcom) December 3, 2023
Ortega and Otte had been together for ten years. Carmen Otte works as a doctor in Jerez and completed her residency at the Virgen del Rocío hospital in Seville. She became the most searched-for woman on the internet on Saturday and news of the cancelled wedding has gone viral. A day later, the newspaper 20Minutos reports, based on sources from her circle of friends, that the abandoned bride is ‘devastated’, ‘doesn’t stop crying, and cannot find comfort’.
Bullfighter has to pay for all wedding costs
Although it is unknown whether the wedding will ultimately take place, everything seems to indicate that it will not. According to reports that emerged just hours after the news broke, the bride’s heartbroken family is planning to start a “war” with the bullfighter. They would do everything in their power to ensure that the bullfighter covers all wedding costs, which amount to more than €70,000.
On Monday, La Vanguardia wrote that the bullfighter’s family announced that ‘personal circumstances’ had forced him to cancel his wedding.
Who is Juan Ortega Pardo?
Juan Ortega Pardo was born on October 8, 1990 in the Triana neighbourhood of Seville, making him just 33 years old. He was trained in the bullfighting schools of his native Seville and in Córdoba, where he also studied Agricultural Engineering. He took the alternative (a ceremony where a ‘novillero’ officially becomes a ‘matador’) on September 27, 2014 in Pozoblanco, Córdoba.