San Fermin
I
Pamplona smells of vomit. This isn’t unusual for Spanish cities. I travelled from Barcelona where the dominant smell of a summer morning is hot baked piss[1]. The smell of vomit isn’t having it all its own way, however - battling against it is the sharp, synthetic smell of lemon-flavoured detergent. Council workers in high-vis trail long orange hoses as they methodically scour the squares and the narrow medieval streets of bile. It’s a game contest but it comes out no better than a score draw - humans are capable of creating odours that no amount of detergent can defeat.
In some respects the vomit-lemon smell is worse than either; a penetrating, chimeric stench, it reminds me of hospital corridors and nursing homes. The rising heat of the sun makes it worse. It cooks. And the vomit has a particular character - a sour, alcoholic quality, doubtless supplemented by the torrents of unvomited alcohol which also spilled across the streets, running in little streams between the cobblestones, making their way under city walls and wending through wheelie bins and temporary stages, streams parting and then rejoining, picking up urine as they go, particles of cigarette ash, blood, an unseen hydrology of waste and good cheer.
I arrive in Pamplona for the penultimate day of San Fermín festival. There are nine days in total. As I walk from the hostel (a couple of miles out of town, you won’t get anywhere in the city to stay without remortgaging your house[2]) a storm threatens. There is a heaviness in the air. Dark, mottled clouds close in, funnelled by the green mountains of Navarra. Threaten is the operative word here: for a time it merely lurks around the city limits, scowling and grumbling. There are flashes of lightning and thunder rattles the window panes in the suburbs, but the storm seems afraid to enter. People hurry along, trusting in their good luck and the momentary gift of calm.
Finally, though, the downpour arrives. The first fat summer raindrop hits my arm and then another. The rain falls in shuddering fits, offering convenient gaps in which to dash from doorway to scaffolding, street tree to awning. I take cover outside the high window of a luxury bakery. On the other side of the glass are rows of almond cookies, apple tarts, chocolate croissants. The well-heeled and largely elderly Spanish clientele inside look nervously at me in case I’m planning on coming in and shaking myself off like a labrador. In between these heavy showers, the sun breaks back through. Sometimes the sun never goes away even as the rain resumes, and I have to shield my eyes from sudden bright July sun which cuts through the torrents.
The thunder sounds like falling hooves.
Sheltering in every bar there is a gaggle of revellers in white and red. Red and white is the uniform of San Fermín. I had picked up via popular consciousness an image of the bull runners in costume but this isn’t exclusive to the encierro. Every man, woman, child and sometimes dog is in regalia. There are some narrow variations, but it is essentially this: white trousers (or shorts, or a skirt), and a white top. Around the waist is a red sash, the faja, and around the neck a red kerchief - the pañuelo. Naturally there is some accessorisation - I see a glamorous old woman in a white dress with a vivid red handbag. There are lots of red baseball caps[3] and red football shirts - we’re in Osasuna territory - but overwhelmingly it is white with a red accent. The pañuelos are sold everywhere you go but most have customised ones, representing their social club (peña) or local area. Many of them are tied under the chin and worn backwards, boy scout style, allowing the nosy to study the regalia, the embroidered names and the flags.
No, you aren’t listening: everyone wears it. Pamplona is a big city and its population swells during San Fermín. Everywhere you look there are crowds, filling every street, park, bar, café and boulevard. Stop where you are, spin slowly around. White and red as far as the eye can see. It is the kind of mass visual co-ordination that you don’t see outside of religious events and football matches[4]. It isn’t just the uniform of the active participants. Elderly couples out for a morning amble with their bichon frisé are still in San Fermín uniform. The whole city participates. It is an impressive, overwhelming display of unity. Arriving at the subterranean bus station you ride the elevator up to the surface and, as your eyes adjust to the glare, the first impression is that you have accidentally travelled to some kind of sprawling cult compound.
As the thunder continues to rattle the streets, bells begin to ring in churches around the city. Are they joining in with the heavens or issuing defiance? Red dye from cheap pañuelos stains the shoulders of festivalgoers pink, though that might also be spilled sangria. Children shriek in delight and run around with their hands flailing, and people cover their beers with their hands. I eat an awful dry bocadillo[5] because the stall has an awning and the rain has picked up again, though I regret it once I realise that there’s a Venezuelan stall a few steps further along, selling gorgeous looking fresh arepas with plastic cups of sweet tamarind juice. Sausages are tossed to blacken over a huge charcoal grill and there are 2l soda bottles cut in half and filled with creamy guasacaca, which is like a sharper, more herbal guacamole. Cumbia is piped in from speakers hidden in the canopy somewhere.
Mistrust the guides: they are full of excited declarations of how well you’re going to eat, of how much you will fill up on pintxos or traditional bowls of stew, but listen - nobody is having a leisurely time with a pintxo when every bar without exception is skin-to-skin thick with people who want to buy a beer in a plastic cup, and every single person working at the bar is already at a hummingbird pitch of stress. The food will be street food and the street food will be good.
By the time I make it to the central square, the Plaza del Castillo, the atmosphere is slightly feverish. The rain passes but the storm has done its job, rattling through everyone’s bones. I wonder if the atmosphere is peculiar to this late point in the festival. Compound hangovers and accreted exhaustion: there is a slight brittleness to everyone. A fight breaks out between a young man and a much older one, t-shirts gripped in white knuckles; the younger is red faced and has the ubiquitous Spanish semi-mullet, the older bald and about twice his size, staring with cold fury. There is a half-hearted effort to break them up. A woman slaps fruitlessly on the older man’s bicep, but his eyes are locked on. There aren’t really coppers anywhere. People are trusted to sort it out themselves. And they do, though only after the young man has his head snapped back by a fierce right hook (he takes it like a champ). I turn from the drama eventually, to see another developing almost immediately, as a middle-aged woman is half-carried by two friends having just had a funny turn. She is deposited on a bench and fanned with a paper plate.
San Fermín is not dangerous. Nothing I see is any more rowdy or debauched than the average Saturday night in a small British town. In fact it’s considerably better. This is the only fight I see the whole time. Nobody is visibly on cocaine. There aren’t police as they don’t appear to be needed[6]. There are children everywhere, at all hours of the day and well into the night, cheerfully scooting around and enjoying the atmosphere. There is an inescapable stink and filth, the broken glass and the vomit and the full bins, but it would be a miracle if it was otherwise - there is no way to deal seamlessly with such astonishing volume of people, most of whom are setting about getting shitfaced[7]. By and large it is safe, convivial, and family-friendly. I wonder how the Spanish manage to do this and to what extent it comes from a deep-learned cultural relaxation. They are inveterate nappers, after all. You have to have a certain psychology to be competent at napping. It’s probably partly that, but it also makes you realise quite how much British nightlife is running on a constant undercurrent of Colombian[8].
There are stages set up all around the city and music is everywhere. Some of it is traditional Basque folk music; some of it is nu-metal. A band called the Bourbon Kings live up to their name as literally as possible, as the lead singer struts around the stage with a bottle of Jack Daniels, pouring it alternately into his own mouth and those of the front row. Much of it seems to go into their eyes and up their nose. The gig itself is excellent. Nu-metal has a gurning, libidinal kind of energy that seems to map onto the feverish crowd perfectly. There is screaming, rapping, soloing, and occasional impish little touches in the mix - they briefly cover Smack My Bitch Up and one song leads into the synth line from Insomnia by Faithless which sends the crowd delirious.
Later in the set several tiny children are passed to the lead singer who sets them down on the stage and encourages them to clap. They are all too shy and wide-eyed and don’t seem to know what to do, so they wobble confused around the middle of the stage until the campest child launches into a furious air guitar, to the delight of the crowd. The gig ends with the lead singer, bassist and guitarist all down in a pit[9]. Somewhere in the crowd a sneaker is taken off and filled with bourbon, before being held aloft like a trophy taken in battle and then chugged. A shoey of Jack Daniels at San Fermín - there’s globalisation for you. Mullets and shoeys: it’s Australia’s world and we’re just living in it.
II
There is something happening everywhere I go. It seems the city at any given time contains at least three marching brass bands, following their own idiomatic trajectory, waving huge cloth banners like union marches and accompanied by long trailing crowds of dancing followers. They are raucous and giddy, and the two out front who are entrusted with the massive wooden poles to hold each end of the banner seem to be given to the most raucous of the lot. Several times I attempt to work out what is supposed to be on the banner, feeling a vague duty towards journalism, but it ripples and collapses and thrashes around so much that it’s near impossible. One party seems to be entirely wearing tropical gear. Another at least is recognisable by the Palestine flags, which are everywhere you go, dangling from every balcony and stickered on every wall. Palestine flags are almost as numerous as the red-and-green Basque ones.
There is an item on the schedule which catches my eye: the Toro del Fuego. This could be anything, but I should have guessed: the Spanish love fireworks and they love firing them at each other. The Bull of Fire is a metal bull frame carried by a couple of strong men, and on its back is mounted an array of fireworks. The bull charges around the narrow medieval streets at the crowds, blazing with fierce white light, sending sparks cascading out and over everyone nearby, who run in delighted fear or duck and cower at the roadside, hoping to keep low enough that they aren’t burned or blinded, the afterimages dancing across their retinas, a simulacrum of the true encierro from earlier in the morning.
The air smells of ozone and spilled beer. The Toro del Fuego does several rounds, turning around to come thundering back the way it came, scattering the crowds once more. Young children are, as with everything else, present and involved for this, running alongside the adults, pursued by fireworks[10]. One father attempts to shield his small son with his body from the rain of sparks, but the child is determined to wriggle free and enjoy them. I read that there are intermittent attempts to stop the Toro del Fuego, presumably after one child too many loses their face, but they never stick. The Spanish[11] are fiercely protective of their local customs. There would simply be no point in getting out of bed if they banned the Bull of Fire.
This spirit of freedom infuses much of the festival. Everyone brings or buys their own booze and drinks it on the street. There is no regulation. There is no fenced off Festival Area with bag searches. There are no small armies of ShowSec zero-hours contractors hustling around checking wristbands. Corner stores open late and sell cold beers by the can or plastic bottles of sangria. Bars take it as a given that anything they serve you is highly likely to be wandered-off with. There is a practical aspect to this - the bars are heaving even with half the participants buying their own booze. Trying to funnel people towards them even further would cause a crush. One place I pass has a special offer - a litre of Southern Comfort, two litres of Coke, and a bag of ice thrown in for free. It is the easy, street-drinking Iberian evening but metastasised across the whole city, through every park and street.
It is liberating. I start to understand what goes through the minds of Americans when they get to drive their big trucks and buy drinks that dissolve zinc. Why shouldn’t I make my own decisions? Am I not trusted to be an adult? What right does the state have to try and prevent me from drinking an entire bottle of lukewarm sangria which I bought from, for some reason, an ironmongers?
At the end of the night, a firework display from the glacis of Pamplona’s castle[12]. During daytime these are the wide roads of a major thoroughfare leaving the city to the south, past office buildings and the bus station. Now they are thick with people sitting on the asphalt eating hot sandwiches, sharing their last cans and waving glow sticks around. There is a warm, hushed, end-of-show kind of atmosphere. Young couples hold hands in the shadows next to a bank. Several generations of families sit together, usually clustered around the folding chairs of those too old to sit on the tarmac. One father has fallen asleep sitting in a pushchair. Later I see him occasionally jerk awake at a particularly loud explosion and then contrive to look like he’d been awake all along. This is a move they teach you in the first week of Dad School.
The tall office buildings trap the sound, making it sharp and echoing, containing it within the urban amphitheatre surrounding the citadella. After the display the competitors, who are controlling affairs from a high gantry, are lit with spotlights where they dance and caper for the cheering crowds like they’ve just delivered a DJ set. The older crowd members and the tiniest filter home, because the night from hereon in is bequeathed to the early-twenties. There are several large stages around town with late night shows[13]. I do not see any of them. We all have our pushchairs.
III
The next day is the final one of San Fermín. I am sure there is another story of San Fermín that starts with the city still fresh, fighting fit, full of the joys of summer. That is not this story. This story smells of vomit and there is a red-eyed, sleep-deprived kind of melancholy in the air. Pamplona is almost - but not quite - partied out. In the spirit of the festival I too am immensely sleep deprived, because reveilles the next day is at 6:45am. And, more significantly, the bulls run at eight.
Okay: no more talking around the topic.
The bulls run at eight.
All the guides are eager to make clear that San Fermín festival is more than the bulls, but nobody seems to have informed Pamplona. This is Bull City at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times - this is San Fermín, which exists out of time altogether. T-shirts are sold on every street corner with bulls printed onto them. Some are naturalistic, some are abstract, some are the kind of winking cartoons used to teach children to brush their teeth - Pedro the Hygiene Bull knows the importance of dental health. Some are visibly AI-generated. Beneath this are the existing bull statues, toreador restaurants, bull run murals, all sharing a little space with Hemingway - although Hemingway wrote about the bulls and you’d have to say was somewhat bullish as writers go. I have no trouble imagining him exhaling deeply and pawing at the earth, musky and barrel-chested and ready to change. Picture Pamplona before you visit and bulls is what you imagine: bulls thundering down narrow streets under balconies heaving with spectators, red flags waving.
Before the commencement of the festival there are several major protests by animal rights groups. Bloodstained activists in bull horns march through the city and stage die-ins. Over the course of the festival there will be eight bull runs in total - the encierro - and those bulls will fight in eight bullfights in the Plaza de Toros.
The encierro and the fight itself are separate but related things. The bulls who run through the city are those who will later be killed. The run ends at the arena. Though it once served a historical purpose (the bulls could not be easily transported to the arena, so they had to be driven through the city streets), running with them has been the act of bravos and thrill-seekers for hundreds of years, becoming increasingly ritualised and prominent in the festivities. It receives international media coverage.
You are advised to get to your preferred point in the route at least two hours early to make sure you’ll have a good view. There are several to choose from. There is Dead Man’s Corner, for example, a tight turning which often causes the bulls to lose their footing and crash into people. Go here if you want a better chance of watching a person die. You can also watch them die on the big screen in the square, or on the live coverage from an overhead zipline camera. There are many ways to watch people die[14].
I do not arrive at 6am. I arrive late. I manage to position myself such that, through a thicket of white and red, there is a gap in the high temporary fencing. Beyond it is a gaggle of waiting police and paramedics, and beyond them is a small square of cobbles which represents my view of the encierro.
While I wait for it to start, I find the live coverage on my phone, curious about how it looks at the beginning. There is a fixed camera shot of the bulls, milling around in their enclosure. I’m afraid it is at this point, before things have even commenced, that my heart breaks. They toss their head and chew idly. They sniff at each other. They are huge, glossy, beautiful animals. They don’t know what’s about to happen. Something of the dramatic irony gets to me. I am too soft for this. I have tried to culturally participate and I have already failed. I do not want these animals to be killed for sport.
The run starts with a burst of fireworks, right by the heads of the bulls, shaking them out of their easy idleness, panicking them. They are immediately goaded forwards, whipped and chased. There are six bulls but they are accompanied by a handful of steers - gelded bulls - who are intended to calm and comfort them as they run, for cows are happiest in a crowd. It makes them feel safe. There seems to be a natural contradiction here, but it is to ensure that the bulls continue moving forwards with the requisite amount of aggression. There would be no bull run if they all instantly panicked and began attacking bystanders (as they occasionally do). These steers will not be killed, though they midwife the chosen six to their eventual deaths.
The runners launch forwards as well. The goal is to run with the bulls for as long as possible and then dive aside. It is best not to lose your footing, not just for your own wellbeing but for those of the people around you. Nevertheless many tumble, or attempt to climb over fences to safety. There is a whole clot of people, not just one or two, and the crowd seems too big to safely part for the bulls, but just as it must every day it does, men (it’s almost always men) diving aside a whisker from a turning horn or flailing hoof.
All of this I witness after the fact, watching it back on YouTube. My experience in the moment is nothing more than a single streak of brown and tan, the tip of a horn, the parting crowd, the high-pitched whizz of the zipline camera sweeping along. Then it is over. It is anticlimactic and upsetting. A little dazed, over-tired, roiling with emotions, I turn away to find that a Spanish man is jabbering at me about, of all things, Call of Duty. Have I played Call of Duty? Call of Duty 2? Modern Warfare? Black Ops. I had no idea he was even talking to me. I thought he was an unrelated muttering man. “Un poco,” I hazard. A little. I make an ambivalent hand gesture. The conversation is so surreal that I wonder if it isn’t a distraction for a pickpocket, but if it is they’ll be disappointed to find everything of value is zipped away.
He looks a little bilious. He leans in too close. “Very classic games,” he says to me reverently. I extricate myself, head spinning. “Welcome to Spain!” he calls after me.
Here’s a confession: I had planned to go to the bullfight too. I am usually vegetarian but I have been eating meat in Spain[15], so I feel obligated not to hide from animal death. If you eat meat you should have the moral courage to watch an animal die. Anthony Bourdain would do it. In fact Anthony Bourdain did do it, and was suitably ambivalent about the whole thing. I am, in many important respects, not Anthony Bourdain.
Any sense I had of journalistic and moral integrity vanished when I saw that little livestream before the run. Phone brightness turned up high to compete with the sun, greasy fingerprints catching the light, the bulls flickering into sharper view as my data wavered.
Not in furious motion, crashing up the streets, tossing spectators aside, crushing ribs under hoof and pulping organs. Those things - oh, you can see why those things might be killed. That blur of pulsing muscle and horn. Effortlessly lethal. You should no more be able to stop a charging bull than you can stop a speeding train.
Chewing happily in their enclosure under the morning sun, they’re just cows.
On the walk to find my spot earlier in the morning, I found my thoughts already drifting to how I’d sell it. Quick lamentation about the brutality of it all, an earnest expression of personal dislike, segue into a kind of grudging awe, the nobility of the honest traveller who is able to swallow the prejudices he brought with him and accept that, however distasteful, there is an inescapable thrill to it, something primeval and joyous, the adrenaline and the crowds that lifts your heart even as it sickens you. Listen to the amphitheatre roar! Which way will Caesar’s thumb fall? Is there not a kind of glory to these men who have honed their craft to such an extent, elevated it to an art in fact, the highest expression of a particular form of Spanish masculinity, even as they use that art to inflict suffering? Isn’t that paradox actually very interesting? Do we, the cossetted woke, the soft-palmed plant-based hybrid workers, not benefit from understanding some of the surging vitality of a bull fight? Perhaps this is what has contributed to the rise of the far-right: a failure to understand that tradition sings in the blood and raises weals, and cannot be safely boxed away and abandoned?
No.
It is ugly and it is cruel and I have no desire to see any of it. I am not Anthony Bourdain. I am not even Ross Kemp.
IV
After a coffee and yet another punishing sandwich, I reach the start of the parade of Gigantes y Babezudos (Giants and Big Heads)[16]. Compared to the bedlam after nightfall, it seems that the morning and early afternoon activities are of a more baroque nature. The Big Heads are as described - leering painted wood and plaster heads, with eyeholes in their smirking mouths for their bearers to see out of. They prance and caper and they carry flails made of sponge, which they make use of to thrash passing children and any adult who doesn’t look to be having the correct amount of fun.
I manage to get whapped after I take a break to sit on a step and look at my phone. He comes up from behind me, thunders it into the side of my head, and then skips away. Many people want to take selfies with them, but they are forced to pay a tax of several further thrashings. Some children are horrified by the whole thing, screaming and attempting to hide behind their parents’ legs. Others are utterly delighted - a tiny blue-eyed baby breaks out into happy tinkling laughter after being given an extremely gentle bop on the forehead. There are seventeen big-heads in total, although not all are so violent - some carry walking sticks and move with a stiff-backed, regal dignity. The faces, built in the 19th century, resemble politicians or soldiers, with pointed tricorn hats, monocles or in the case of the zaldikos the chassis of a horse around them, making them appear as knights. There is a contagious sense of fun to proceedings, as the parade moves down the road and unaware tourists and passers-by are absorbed or delivered a sudden sponging from their blindside.
The Big Heads act as the advance party for the Giants, four metre tall figures who do not dance but are slowly raised and heaved along by a single bearer, who is lost somewhere in their trousers/petticoats. They are exquisitely detailed and were built in 1860, representing four pairs of kings and queens from four continents. The royals representing Asia and Africa are about what you’d expect from the time period: perhaps let’s leave it at that. These are far more stately than the babezudos, though the bearer will occasionally do a little pirouette for the assembled crowds. They waddle rather than caper, making their stately procession very carefully indeed.
Eventually all have assembled outside of the council chambers of Pamplona, where every member of the council, including presumably the Spanish equivalent of SpAds and whoever does the socials, emerges in their own baroque uniform, accompanied by a brass band in cream blazers. Several members of the council party carry ornate silver maces, and all are in shiny-buttoned 19th century garb. It’s notable that so many of the traditions of San Fermín seem to have been codified in the 19th century, or later still. The red-and-white doesn’t reliably date back any further than the 1930s. San Fermín is a living tradition.
The afternoon is lost again in a whirl of brass, music, beers in plastic cups, folk-dancing, children shrieking, white-on-red everywhere, an endless rippling sea of it. And, perhaps seized by an urgency as the final hours approach, chaos abounds. Every bar in Plaza de Castillo seems to have its own sound system, despite the fact they all not only face inwards into the square but all towards the massive central stage, on which some Basque 90s folk-pop legends are doing their best not to look too divorced.
The Macarena plays from inside the famous Cafe Iruña, where Hemingway sat and wrote The Sun Also Rises[17]. The main stage is loud enough to spread across the square, blurring and smudging together. There are more fireworks and they sound like artillery firing overhead, rattling the window frames and bouncing around the four sides of the plaza. It sounds like the world is ending. The sensory overload is total. I wonder whether I should put my headphones in like an overstimulated child. The several empanadas I ate earlier are like a flat, hot weight in my stomach. My breath tastes of sangria. A dog eats from a pile of vomit as quickly as possible before his owner notices, heaving down as much partially-masticated longaniza as he can hold. I watch it and decide that I have eaten my last sausage. A bottle shatters and the top half of it skitters across the square, spinning like a top.
And then it’s almost midnight, and every person in the city it seems is shambling, drifting, fleeing towards the Plaza Consistorial, the square in front of the council chambers, for the closing of the festival. The raucousness is finally burning out. Nine days of shredded nerves and dehydration are focused now on a single final point. Candles are sold along the way[18] and nobody pushes or shoves. I make my way with the flow of the crowd. Plastic cups are piled high on tables which sit askew on the cobbles. The council building is lit up in deep red, giving it the aspect of a vampire castle. As the minutes approach midnight, those inside it begin to file out onto the grand carved balconies, and are greeted with cheers. They wave gleefully down, unaccustomed to being treated like celebrities. A brass band strikes up, but not the bouncing march that has been clattering around the streets for days. A more dignified lament.
This is pobre de mí. The words in full read: poor me, poor me, the festival of San Fermín has ended. Everybody sings, including a man to my right who rips out the kind of thunderous baritone which belongs in La Scala. The red neckerchiefs are untied and held aloft. After the song finishes, they won’t be worn again for another year. I raise mine too. There is a melancholy air, but you suspect also one of relief. The party is over because eventually all parties must be. The city can air itself out and catch up on sleep. The song goes on for about ten minutes, and then the hands are lowered. Some kerchiefs are tied around the wrist. Everyone slowly, calmly, and quietly, turns around and begins to go home.
V
There were six injuries to runners in the final day’s bull run. One spinal injury, one arm injury, one contusion to the head, and several other heavy bruises. One runner found himself caught on a bull’s horn as it entered the arena, but managed to free himself before sustaining a more serious injury. The whole run took just over two minutes, which was markedly fast. The bulls were from the infamous Miura breeders, notorious for their size and aggression. They have inflicted sixteen gorings in total, though none in the last four years, despite some near misses.
None of the bulls survived.
[1] Being British does suggest I should be a little cautious here, we are regarded as city pissers par excellence. And it’s true. Send us abroad and fill us up with beer, and the urge to degrade something beautiful rises up in us like a prayer. But it must be said that Europeans need absolutely no help pissing all over their own cities. In León as I walked through the city at dawn, the street cleaners were out then too, hosing away all of the piss from the night before, where it played host to a series of Spanish stag parties. And they say we don’t integrate!
[2] Clearly I do not own a house. You wonder if bon mots like this will fade from use as the housing crisis bites deeper. I’m not sure what an appropriate equivalent is: financing it on Klarna, perhaps.
[3] Red caps have developed a bad rap in the last decade, but here they blend seamlessly in with the attire - though I do see a black one with “Make Nafarroa Great Again” written across the front. There’s no point in reading anything into this - the chance of seeing something written in English in Spain which isn’t somewhere on the Pickle Rick to Live Laugh Love spectrum is near zero. Later I see a man wearing one which says, “I haven’t lost my virginity because I never lose”. Hell yeah brother.
[4] It’s easy - too easy - to lean on these kinds of religious analogies. It’s a mass communal act - it begs for it. It’s a celebration of a saint. I have to say it feels entirely secularised though. I only see one mention of prayers in the official schedule. So then you find yourself reaching for an equally hoary back-up - perhaps it isn’t Christianity but a kind of secular communion, a faith in the city itself, in tradition without God, a faith in your neighbour and your history. In Galicia I fell into the festival of San Xuan, a typically galego kind of syncretism, very Catholic and also very wiccan, celebrating the solstice with Devils firing fireworks at each other and glowing signs of witches on broomsticks. It’s a little hard to see where Jesus fits in, but you can’t say it isn’t a celebration. Well, look: I’m talking myself into it. Sometimes the hacky analogies are the best ones because they happen to be true. All great parties have the feel of worship. Pamplona is a city of faith, too: it is the first major city on the iconic Camino Francés, though there are unlikely to be many pilgrims during the festival - all of the albergues (pilgrim hostels) close their doors, and the atmosphere isn’t particularly suited to those hoping to wake up at 5am to walk. People haven’t even finished drinking by 5am.
[5] If the best writing is honest, let me speak my truth: the reputation of the Spanish for good quality sandwiches is dramatically overstated. I’ve had more dry bocadillos in a few months than I had in years in the UK, where we have far more fresh salad and a grand national condiment tradition. Chutney, mayonnaise, mustard, brown sauce, salad cream, lashings of butter or mayonnaise. Is the bread as good? Is the ham as good? I put it to you that it simply doesn’t matter. A good sandwich should be moist enough to stand on its own feet, and sometimes they don’t even have a tomato. We’ve all had good ones, but I would assert that the median Spanish sandwich is no better than adequate in the grand rankings. Sue me.
[6] Are they ever?
[7] Quite likely on kalimotxo, which is an even mix of red wine and Coca Cola, poured over ice. If you’re wondering what it tastes like, it’s actually very easy to imagine. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Slightly flat, wine-y coke, or sticky, brown, oversweet red wine. Ghastly stuff.
[8] And I don’t mean empanadas.
[9] A pit of sorts, anyway. As above, the crowd is littered with tiny children, any of whom could be punted over the nearest building by mistake. It is a very polite pit.
[10] You try not to be a parochial, wide-eyed Englishmen. You wouldn’t get away with this in Margate, you think. But you really, really wouldn’t get away with this in Margate. What cultural practices do we have left which are not just openly unsafe but this strange and surreal? They are deliberately loud, shocking, ruptures in normality. I suppose there’s always the cheese rolling, but that’s so localised, more of a charming novelty than a serious folk tradition. This would be like doing the cheese roll down Oxford Circus. It is - I’m afraid to say - health and safety gone mad.
[11] But of course they aren’t all Spanish, that’s the whole point: they are Galician, they are Basque, they are Andalucian, they are Catalan. Spain is a loosely federated set of autonomous regions pretending to be a country.
[12] Pamplona’s castle is not Medieval: it was built during the Renaissance, a jagged star fort with deep killzones that now form paths for dog walkers and teenage drinkers. It was never seriously besieged, though it was taken by Napoleon whose troops allegedly rushed the gate under cover of pretending to participate in a snowball fight.
[13] I am gutted that I wasn’t able to see “Adrian Body” though.
[14] The last runner to die was in 2009, but there’s still a good chance you’ll see someone gored instead. Gored is easily in my top ten worst things to be.
[15] I have been blaming it on the godawful standard of vegetarian food but we must call it what it is: spinelessness.
[16] In another total abdication of journalistic responsibility I’d been refusing to look up what any of the names on the schedule meant. Anything which sounded thrillingly Spanish got added to the list. As a method of enjoying the festival it’s hard to beat.
[17] I was planning to read it to act as scaffolding around this piece but it turned out to be corrupted on my Kindle. If it seems like there is a certain literary gravitas missing, that’ll be why.
[18] To prevent them blowing out or dripping on people, each candle has been inserted through a hole cut into the bottom of a plastic cup or, in several cases, a cardboard cappuccino cup.