Every year in July the city of Pamplona in northeastern Spain holds a rollicking weeklong festival dedicated to the city’s patron, Saint Fermín. There’s drinking, parades, dancing, and revelry late into the night. To an uninitiated observer, it would all look pretty normal except for one thing: there are an unusually large number of paramedics and ambulances on hand. That’s because this festival happens to center on a dangerous and world-famous tradition known in Spanish as the encierro and in English as the running of the bulls.
Here’s how it goes. Early in the morning on every day of the festival, about 2,000 people line up to participate in the run. At 8:00 AM the rocket that signals the start of the event is launched, and the runners set off in a tight pack down an 875-meter (half-mile) course that winds through the narrow streets of the city center. A few moments later a second rocket announces the arrival of the guests of honor: six fighting bulls accompanied by six or more steers whose job it is to keep the bulls on course and motivated. Even though it’s hard for the bulls to keep their footing on the cobblestones, they are still faster than most humans, running the course in about two and a half minutes. Inevitably, there are some terrifying human-bull interactions. Lucky humans dodge out of the way as the bulls pass them, less lucky humans get knocked down and trampled, and a few very unlucky humans get skewered on the bulls’ horns. Since bulls tend to lower their heads and thrust upward when attacking, injuries to the groin are common. Fatalities, though, are surprisingly rare. About 15 people have been killed in the last century. The encierro ends when the runners and bulls reach the bullfighting ring. In the afternoon the bulls are slaughtered in bullfights, and the human runners return to their revelry.
Pamplona’s tradition of running ahead of the bulls on the way to a bullfight may date back to the 16th century or earlier, but it was popularized and romanticized in the 20th century by the writer Ernest Hemingway, who fell in love with the Fiesta de San Fermín when he attended it in 1923. He came back in 1924 and 1925 and then wrote a novel about it: The Sun Also Rises (1926).
The festival has its detractors. In recent years animal rights activists have protested the festival and called for it to be banned, since the bulls are placed under extreme stress by the encierro and are then brutally killed in the bullfighting ring. These protests do not seem to have dampened enthusiasm for the festival, though. More than a million people attend each year, and about half the people who run in the encierro are tourists.