A whole tradition, findable on a phone.

The challenge

In a tourada à corda, a bull on a long rope runs through a village street while the crowd keeps its distance. It has at least 450 years of written history on Terceira, and every season from May to October brings hundreds of them. They are filmed by a dozen local channels, announced on municipal sites and remembered in old film, but none of it sits in one place.

Much of the audience is older and on a phone, or watching from California, Canada or New England. They look for a tourada by what they remember: the parish, the ranch, the year.

The films already existed. What was missing was a way to find them by the things people remember, in their own language, on the phone in their hand.

The approach

An archive shelved the way people remember

The archive gathers the public uploads of 12 channels that film touradas, from 2003 on. The date, place, parish, ranch and bull numbers are read from each video’s title, so the archive can be searched and filtered by parish, ranch, year or island. Each film plays as an embed from its channel and can be sent on by WhatsApp.

Updates itself, and says where everything came from

Every morning a scheduled job reads the season’s agenda from the Câmara Municipal da Praia da Vitória and the channels’ new uploads, then publishes the changes. A full re-read runs on the first of each month. Whether a channel is live is checked when a visitor asks, at most once every two minutes. A source that fails keeps its last good data, and every event and film links back to where it came from.

Live when there is live, honest when there isn’t

The live section lists the channels that broadcast touradas. When one goes live, the stream appears on the page by itself; otherwise it shows the last broadcast and when the next season starts. From May to mid-October the live section and the agenda move to the top of the page.

History with the source beside every claim

The history page tells the tradition from the bishop of Angra’s ban in 1559 to the law of 2018. Every statement carries its source in brackets, by author, work, volume and page, linked to a digitised edition where one exists.

The result

On 3 November 2026 the site’s own statistics counted 3,037 filmed events from 12 channels, on 4 islands and across 21 seasons, plus 44 older films going back to 1929 and a map of 90 places in 9 countries where the diaspora keeps the tradition. The numbers are recalculated from the data every day.

Alongside the hub: a shop for digital files and printed replicas paid through Stripe, a browser game, and a tool that cuts and shares a clip of a visitor’s own video.

How it’s built

Static pages on Vercel, with the agenda, live list and archive kept as JSON written by Python scripts. A GitHub Actions workflow runs them each morning, regenerates the static pages, sitemaps and statistics, and commits the result; every commit publishes in about thirty seconds. Small Vercel functions handle the live check, sign-ups and payment confirmation. Every branch and pull request is built and checked automatically.

Status and scope

Live and free. ALLOIC designs, builds and maintains it, and it shows the full range a client build can carry: design, two languages, automated data, maps and payments.

What it is

A working public site anyone can open, with an archive that updates itself, a source for every event and film, and a layout made for phones first.

Limits

Not commissioned client work. The archive counts touradas filmed and published on YouTube, not every tourada held, and its details are read from video titles, so the odd date or ranch can be wrong. No traffic figures are shown here.