Pamplona y los Sanfermines — Pamplona and the San Fermín Festival

Sanfermines, and an argument Spain is still having

San Fermín runs from the sixth to the fourteenth of July in Pamplona and is two things at once: an enormous week-long street festival, and the bull run that made it internationally famous. The festival opens at noon on the sixth with el chupinazo, a rocket fired from the town hall balcony into a square packed with people in white with red scarves, and it does not really stop until the ninth day's Pobre de mí. Most of it is music, eating, drinking and peñas parading through the streets. El encierro is the part visitors picture. Every morning at eight, six fighting bulls are driven through about eight hundred and fifty metres of closed-off streets to the bullring, with runners ahead of and among them. It lasts a few minutes. Injuries are annual and numerous, mostly from falls and crushing rather than from horns; deaths are rare but real, with a small number recorded over the past century. The runners who know what they are doing run short sections; the ones who get hurt are disproportionately those who do not. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is why so many foreigners are there, and Pamplona has mixed feelings about that. The bulls run to the ring because they will be fought there that afternoon, and this is where Spain genuinely disagrees with itself. The legal position is that bullfighting is protected: a 2013 law declared la tauromaquia part of Spain's cultural heritage, which limits what regional governments can do about it. Catalonia banned it in 2010 and the Constitutional Court struck the ban down in 2016 on competence grounds, though in practice bullfights have not returned to Barcelona. The Canary Islands banned it in 1991 and it never resumed there. Public opinion has moved substantially: attendance has fallen for decades, support is much lower among younger Spaniards than older ones, and a large minority — in some surveys a majority — favours ending it, while a committed constituency regards it as art and as heritage under attack. This course does not have a position on that, and Sofía's is the honest one to model: por un lado entiendo la tradición; por otro, matizo mucho. What is worth knowing as a learner is that the subject is live rather than settled, that it divides families and regions rather than aligning neatly with politics, and that both es maltrato and es patrimonio are things you will hear said sincerely by people who have thought about it. If you want to ask about it, ¿tú qué opinas de los toros? is a perfectly normal question. Announcing your own verdict before hearing theirs is the thing that closes the conversation.