Olé Toiro Terceira: The Red Brand Across the Atlantic

There are traditions that survive because they are written into laws, archives, or monuments. And then there are traditions that survive because they become inseparable from the emotional bloodstream of a people. On the island of Terceira, tauromaquia belongs to the latter category. It lives not merely in arenas or festivities, but in memory, landscape, family lineage, rural identity, communal ritual, and in that profound Atlantic relationship between man, animal, land, courage, and spectacle that has marked the island for generations.

It is precisely this larger cultural and historical universe that the book A Divisa Vermelha, published in December of 2025 in Angra do Heroísmo, seeks to document and preserve. Written by José Paulo Lima, with photography by Edgardo Vieira and edited by Liduíno Borba, the work traces five generations of some of the most significant cattle breeders in the history of Terceira Island — from Tomaz de Mesquita Borba to Fernando Marques — while simultaneously mapping a full century of Festa Brava in both the Azores and the North American diaspora.

More than a book about bulls, however, A Divisa Vermelha is ultimately a book about continuity. About inheritance. About how identity survives oceans.

The opening chapter situates the reader within the deep historical roots of cattle raising in the Azores. Since the arrival of the first settlers in the fifteenth century, bovine culture became inseparable from the economic and social formation of the islands. What began as agricultural necessity evolved on Terceira into something culturally singular: the breeding of fighting bulls connected to the island’s taurine traditions. Over time, the presence of the bravo shaped the interior landscape, social rituals, local economies, parish festivities, and even the psychological geography of the island itself.

As José Paulo Lima writes, being a breeder of fighting bulls on Terceira “is much more than an occupation — it is a commitment of the soul, an act of love toward land, tradition, and the cultural identity of a people.”

That sentence perhaps captures the essence of the entire work.

The book then moves through the great figures who shaped the famed “divisa vermelha” bloodline, beginning with the legendary Tomaz de Mesquita Borba (1905–1965), whose influence became foundational to modern Terceiran tauromaquia. The following chapters carefully follow the succession of breeders — Fernandes de Miranda, Álvaro Inácio Gomes, and Eliseu Gomes — whose stewardship preserved and expanded this taurine lineage across decades of transformation within Azorean society.

Yet the emotional center of the work culminates with Fernando Manuel Paim Marques and the remarkable transatlantic trajectory of the Quinta do Olé Toiro.

Born in the parish of São Brás, on Terceira Island, in 1960, Fernando Marques emigrated to Canada at the age of fourteen to join his family. Like so many Azorean emigrants, his story became one of labor, sacrifice, reinvention, and perseverance. He worked across multiple sectors — restaurants, pharmaceuticals, cleaning services — before building a successful construction enterprise employing over one hundred Azorean workers through numerous subcontracting companies.

But success alone did not complete the emotional map of exile. Because for many Azoreans abroad, prosperity never entirely replaces belonging.

And so, roughly twenty-five years ago, Fernando Marques undertook something larger than business:
he decided to recreate a fragment of Terceira in Canada.

The Quinta do Olé Toiro was born in Arthur, Ontario, after Marques acquired his first thirty-five bulls in California from Frank Vaz Borba — himself a direct descendant of Tomaz de Mesquita Borba and the first breeder of fighting bulls in the United States. There, in the flat Canadian pastures north of Toronto, Azorean identity found another improbable Atlantic extension.

Touradas gathered thousands of emigrants. Religious processions evoked Terceira’s patron saints.

The sounds, rituals, and emotional textures of the island re-emerged thousands of kilometers away from the volcanic landscapes that first produced them.

The diaspora, once again, proved capable not merely of preserving tradition, but of transplanting it into new geographies without entirely losing its soul.

The symbolic culmination of this transatlantic journey occurred in 2025 when Fernando Marques acquired from Eliseu Gomes the original ganadaria founded by Tomaz de Mesquita Borba himself. With that act, the “divisa vermelha” completed a kind of historical circle — returning symbolically to its Terceiran origins while simultaneously remaining tied to its Canadian extension.

Today, the Olé Toiro Terceira project, headquartered in the parish of São Bartolomeu, exists as both an Azorean and a diasporic reality: an Atlantic bridge between island and emigrant memory.

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies precisely in this diasporic dimension. The work reminds readers that Azorean tauromaquia did not remain confined to Terceira. It emigrated alongside the people themselves. In 1958, the first bullfight ever held in Canada took place in Lindsay, Ontario, drawing nearly five thousand spectators. In California, Frank Vaz Borba established one of the earliest continuous breeding operations for fighting bulls in North America, already organizing events in Gustine by 1961.

These details matter because they reveal something essential about Azorean culture:
its traditions survive not because they remain frozen in place,
but because they travel. They adapt. They root themselves again wherever Azoreans attempt to recreate community.

A Divisa Vermelha therefore becomes much more than a taurine chronicle. It is a document of Azorean migration, memory, and cultural persistence. It demonstrates how deeply the Festa Brava became intertwined with the emotional identity of Terceira and how that identity crossed the Atlantic with emigrants who refused to allow distance to erase who they were.

Ultimately, the story of Fernando Marques and the Olé Toiro Terceira is not simply about bulls. It is about the eternal Azorean tension between departure and return. Between exile and belonging. Between building a life abroad and carrying an island forever within the heart.

And perhaps that is why the image emerging from this book feels so profoundly Azorean:
a man standing in Canadian fields, thinking always of Terceira, while somewhere in the Atlantic the red brand of memory continues to pass from generation to generation like an inheritance of the soul.

José Andrade is the current Director for Communities of the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores – Text based on the presentation delivered on Terceira Island, Azores.