I saw a video of Bullfighting today and the question in my title sprang to my mind. The Wikipedia article on the history of the event isn't comprehensive enough on the evolution of bullfighting from a gladiatorial event to it's own event to answer my question. What is it about Iberian culture that caused bullfighting to survive as it did? Also, I know long into the medieval period chariot racing survived in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, but beyond that and bullfighting, I'm not aware of other "descendants" of gladiatorial combat persisting in the former provinces of any part of the Roman Empire. Are there any?
I have to question the assumption that this is a remnant of Roman gladiatorial sports at all.
My books on tauromachia show it developing from hunting bulls on horseback in the wild, to hunting them on horseback in an arena to show off (and they did have some old Roman ones lying around), and only in the late 1700s or later dismounting. Portuguese bullfights remained mounted.
You see, state Christianity resulted in the gladiatorial games being outlawed in 325, though it took a century or two of repeated bans to make it stick. Venationes, beast hunts, continued to the late 500s. I've never read anything that connected the two, as there would be something like a near-thousand-year gap in there.
You must remember that Spain was over-run and ruled by successive waves of non-Romans, that would also help break any tradition: first the Visigoths over the Pyrenees to establish the Visigothic kingdoms, that were Arian rather than Roman Catholic, then the Muslim Moors coming up from Morocco to conquer much of the peninsula. The stronghold of bullfighting, Andalusia, as opposed to anti-bullfighting Catalonia, is not the most Roman/Latin part of the peninsula, but the most Moorish.