The story
San Fermin Festival in Pamplona
Pamplona's nine-day July festival built around the daily encierro, the run of fighting bulls through the old town toward the bullring, alongside religious processions, bullfights, and the marching bands of the city's peñas clubs. Opens with the chupinazo rocket on July 6 and closes with a candlelit lament on July 14.
San Fermin Festival turns Pamplona's old town into the staging ground for the encierro, the daily run of six fighting bulls and a handful of steers through 850 meters of barricaded streets to the bullring, a ritual immortalized internationally after Ernest Hemingway wrote about the festival in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.