Medieval Spanish town hosts running of the bulls

By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

The fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, may be the most famous and most misunderstood public party in the world.

Every year from July 6 to 14, Pamplona is inundated by a surge of revelers. Over nine days, 1.5 million people pass through, every one of them seemingly heading for the historic center of town, an area of about two square miles. Only a few come for more than two or three days, but the flow is incessant.

Pamplonans who can't take it pack up and leave town.

Still, there are many who stay. They adore their fiesta -- made famous by Ernest Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises" -- and live it with their whole hearts despite the chaos. It's about forgetting the rules, declaring a sort of invisible social cease-fire that allows everyone to be spontaneous once a year without fear of repercussion.

It starts with a bang -- 30 of them, a succession of rockets fired at noon on July 6, accompanied by a rain of red and white streamers and confetti. This is the official launch of the festivities. In the plaza, a packed crowd somehow manages to spray wild deluges of cheap Champagne everywhere.

Everywhere there is noise.

At 7 o'clock each morning of the nine-day fiesta, squads of men start to set up wooden barriers along the path of the encierro, the daily running of the bulls. On this particular day as many as 6,000 runners, mostly men above the official minimum age of 18, have chanted the traditional prayer to San Fermin for protection and have positioned themselves along the stretch of streets from the bullpen to the Plaza de Toros, where the animals will await the evening's corrida, or bullfight.

At 8 a.m., a rocket signals that the six bulls are on their way. The bulls have always been driven through town to the bullring, and running in front of them probably began spontaneously. To show courage, or to show one's faith in the saint's protection, once had real importance. For some today it still does.

The bulls cover the half-mile distance in about two minutes. At street level it is all hugely anticlimactic (unless you happen to be at the spot where a runner makes a mistake). If you manage to see anything besides a mob of other people, you will glimpse the bulls for about three seconds.

To a runner, of course, it's something else entirely. "It's adrenaline over the top," said Eduardo Arregui, a young engineer, who has run the encierro every year for nearly half his life.