I’ve lost count of the bars and hotels I’ve been to in Spain which Ernest Hemingway reputedly frequented. Pamplona, however, lays the greatest claim on his affections and legacy. The capital of Navarra—a city of 200,000 inhabitants—swells in size in summer as up to a million people take part in the San Fermin festivities that run from the 6th to 14th July. These include eight encierros, where humans run with six bulls at 8am in the morning in a televised chase that lasts between two and three minutes, following a set 875 metre course beginning on the Santa Domingo hill and culminating in the city’s bullring. Tourists underestimate the risks at their peril but some veteran foreign runners, such as the late Welsh Noel Chandler or US citizen Joe Distler, have become local celebrities, attaining a very high standard.
In 1967, Pamplona Town Council agreed to rename the street outside the bullring Hemingway Way in honour of the American Nobel Laureate who had given their local festivities a universal appeal, with a bronze statue erected soon afterwards. Yet when he returned to Pamplona in the 1950s, Hemingway feared he had ruined the San Fermin party, exposing it to the global imagination. It’s true no other major event in Spain to involve bulls is so reliant on foreigners, who make up over 40 per cent of the 17,126 runners Truth be told, however, Hemingway was always more obsessed with this than the locals. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, first published in 1927—five years after Pamplona’s current bull-ring was first opened to the public—is as fixated on tourism and preserving “authenticity” as it with bulls.
In reality, Spain’s mass tourism boom of the 1960s was a double-edged sword for the bulls. Exotic difference was marketable; anarchic medieval barbarism less so. Pamplona’s encierros went from strength to strength, whilst festivities involving the collective slaughter or mocking of the bulls elsewhere in the Peninsula were often banned by the centralist Francoist establishment, providing one explanation as to why locals continue to defend them into the twenty-first century. The Catalan parliament may have banned corridas—professional bullfights—but neither it nor local mayors have made more than token gestures to prevent bulls, often with their horns set alight, being chased through local streets.
The boisterous masses who fill the 20,000 seats of the world’s third largest bullring (after Mexico and Madrid) are not renowned for their discernment, but they do reward and expect bravery. The macho posturing and cultural cache of a literary travel writer who mythologised Pamplona for his psychic needs has been instrumental to the unique and profitable city brand, as sincerely felt by locals as it is reliant on international patronage. Joseba Asirón, the current left-wing mayor, quickly backtracked on his statement that, though he could not image the San Fermin fiestawithout bulls, the prohibition of corridas could be on the cards when breeders make it clear they would not allow their produce to participate inencierros if they were not then to face a matador. A booming tourist industry helps to keep customs alive, with locals delighting in the delight taken by outsiders.
Just down the road from the Hemingway Donor Kebab shop, holiday snaps are taken of youngsters playing amongst a statue of charging bulls and petrified fallen men. Children are socialised into a culture through mock encierros with pretend bulls, first participating alongside their parents and, as they approach teenage years, with friends. Pamplona may lack the number of serious aficionados to be found in Seville, Madrid, or even Bilbao, but for nine days a year bulls are integrated into the fabric of life and identity like nowhere else in Spain.
Like Franco’s ministers, modern-day tour operators strike a careful balance when marketing Pamplona’s unique selling points. The webpage for Bucket List Event’s “Run with the Bulls” package advises potential clients not to use Google, but rather to view their description and promotional video, which features partying aplenty and footage of former participants socialising in the bullring—but is careful to eschew footage of the corrida itself. Encierros incur more visible injuries to humans than to bulls—although the experience is hardly devoid of trauma for the latter who, unlike the former, never volunteered to take part. The fear and pain of the mad dash is, however, nothing in comparison to what animals will later encounter in the ring. In 2013, the League against Cruel Sports produced the film Pamplona: Running of the Bulls which, its title aside, focussed more heavily on the corridas, rites aficionados claim to be culture not sport.
In the course of killing the fifty-four bulls who participated in the encierros this year, seven professional matadors were gored or tossed, with two being hospitalised. Juan José Padilla, who lost an eye to a bull in Zaragoza in 2011, was the week’s major draw, having recently announced his retirement. His trademark pirate persona was exacerbated by a bandana necessitated by the thirty head stiches resulting from a serious goring less than a week previously. Following an impressive outing, melodrama prevailed as the much-loved buccaneer kissed the sand and appeared to shed tears out of his remaining eye. The collective euphoria and spontaneous sociality that ensued was pure Hemingway. I’ve been offered both cocaine and Pringles by strangers before, but not by the same person at the same time.
