Blasco Ibanez is, surprisingly, the first Spanish fiction writer to use the national sport as a theme for a novel.

Literary precedents must then be found in Prosper Merimee's novel Carmen (1847), a theme later repeated in Bizet's opera of the same name. The emphasis of Blood and Sand on the psychological aspects of the seduction of Juan Gallardo allows one to distinguish this novel from Blasco's two earlier stylistic models, the naturalist and the moralist.

This book did, in turn, serve as inspiration for Hemingway's famous novel about bullfighting, The Sun Also Rises (1926).