Five short stories about the fiesta de San Fermín

On July 6, at midday, a rocket went off in Pamplona, the capital of Navarre and one of the great towns of the Basque Country, marking the beginning of this year’s fiesta of San Fermín. I watched it live on YouTube at eight in the evening my time and felt nothing but sick to my stomach. I should have been there.

You may hate the running of the bulls, or the fighting of them. My parents do. (They once walked out of Ronda’s Corrida Goyesca, which must have been one of the strangest things the Andalusians around them, dressed in their Sunday best, had ever seen. Many a tongue was doubtless clucked.) They hate it when I go to Pamplona, too, and not only because I occasionally run. But nothing makes me sadder than being away from Spain at this time of year. I do not necessarily miss the encierro. I do not even necessarily miss the corrida. I miss my people, and my second home, and I miss the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, for at least ten days a year, I belong somewhere.

My best friend Joseph Furey recently re-upped his 2015 piece for the Daily Telegraph’s Sunday magazine, ‘Taurus rising’, which is the best piece of journalism written about Pamplona this century. My own piece, which follows here, is not as good, and was written a couple of years earlier, in advance of my second fiesta in 2013. It was first published in Running the Bulls with Hemingway & Other Pamplona Tales by Graeme Galloway (ed.) and others. It has been ever so slightly edited.

1.

On the morning of the first encierro I ever saw, the first encierro of the year in question, I found myself on a balcony overlooking the square outside the town hall. It was before the first police lines had broken and thousands of people, mostly young men, were packed in tight as they awaited their fate.

Unlike most of the foreigners among them, I had been given the opportunity to speak to some of the veteran runners and to ask for their advice prior to the first bulls being loosed: almost all of them had advised me not to run on the first two days, if at all, if ever, and to make sure that I’d watched at least two encierros, or three, or a