To say July is to say Tour de France and, also, to say San Fermín. If in the sleepiness of the siesta we see on television hard-working cyclists climbing impossible branches or defying the stopwatch, in Pamplona the challenge is different and the bull, with capital letters, in the center of a universe of chaotic appearance and contrasting emotions.
The serene and calm city is transformed, invaded by visitors of all walks of life, origin, creed and language that multiply by five, by six (this year, says the new mayoress, breaking records), in search of an elixir against routine. From the morning running of the bulls to the night running of the bulls, with the bullfight in the afternoon as the point of convergence of both, everything is bull, despite those who insist on the contrary.
The fiesta and the Fiesta lived as if there were no tomorrow, from the chupinazo at noon on July 6 in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, red handkerchiefs raised in the air that, at the moment, are tied around the neck and will continue there until the poor de mi de midnight on the 14th.
There is documentation that dates the first running of the bulls in Pamplona in 1385 when the King of Navarra, Carlos II ‘El Malo’ organized bullfights around the festivity of Santiago and it was the shepherds of the area who brought the cattle from the field to the center of the town. city. In the middle of the 19th century, the running of the bulls ended in the Plaza del Castillo, converted into a bullring. The arrival of the railway in the capital of Navarra meant that the bulls moved on it and the work of the shepherds was no longer necessary, which, against the popular will, wanted to take advantage of the local powers to end the running of the bulls, without success. In 1867, the City Council issued an edict that regulated the running of the bulls and the inauguration of the bullring in 1922 led to the running of the bulls in the form that we know today and continues.
Undoubtedly, for better and for worse, the arrival of Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona in 1923 as a reporter for the newspaper ‘Toronto Star’ marked a before and after for the Sanfermines and its worldwide expansion.
“Pamplona is an elegant city, located on a plateau between the mountains of Navarra, the best land I have ever seen,” he wrote barely a year later. And thirty later, he summarized: “I will never be able to do more than what Pamplona has done for me.”
The author of Fiesta, published in 1926, was not the only “foreigner” fascinated by the Sanfermines. In October 2015, I had the opportunity to sign in La Vanguardia the obituary of Noel Chandler, a Welshman and senior executive of a multinational, who made Pamplona his place in the world every July and who, already retired, lived there until his death. . His apartment on Calle Estafeta, its two balconies overlooking it, were, at the time of the confinement, a meeting place for friends from all over the world. And since I enjoyed, I suffered, moments of emotional intensity that are difficult to rationally explain but that remain in the selective memory of the soul.
Noel was not only passionate about running the bulls, who ran them until age and exertion advised to see them “leaning out on the balcony”, but also toured the bullfighting geography with Ronda and her Goyesca as another unavoidable destination. Three thousand five hundred bullfights, he counted having witnessed.
There is the detail, what Cantinflas would say.
The running of the bulls is, in Pamplona as in other towns that maintain this tradition, the prelude to the bullfight. Without a bullfight, the running of the bulls is meaningless and should be considered as such.
It turns out that, a sign of the times, there are those who advocate morning confinements without bullfights in the afternoon, following a mantra that leads -as a last example- to a very popular television space a couple of decades ago that had in the games of the contestants with a heifer their greatest attraction is announced now, on their return to programming, with the removal of the animal replaced by a stuffed animal in the shape of “Toro Ferdinando”.
Today, July 6, the chupinazo heralds the start of eight frantic days, the city is a party and every afternoon, until the 14th, twenty thousand people, dressed in white and red, gather in the Plaza de Bulls.
The one in Pamplona at the Bull Fair, the cattle ranches carry the bulls with cloth, the bullfighters face them trying to isolate themselves from the noise, the environmental revelry and they know that this, the noise, the songs, will be silence before the most thunderous olé, the one that It comes out of the shadow and the sun, when in the arena bull and bullfighter come together to explain the miracle of bullfighting.
And so, between La Chica Yé yé, El rey and other San Fermin hymns sung at the top of their lungs, also the Waltz of Astrain: a party like no other, riauriau.
