Pamplona is the capital of the Autonomous Community of Navarre, a semi-Basque province to the south of the Pyrenees. Pamplona is the Spanish name whereas the Basques call it Iruña - both names are used on signs. It has a very long and tumultuous history, as befits a strategic border city, but is probably best known for its bulls. Every July the notorious San Ferminfestival sees the beasts let loose to charge through the city centre from the riverside to the bullring, and thousands come to prove their machismo by dodging alongside, eight days running. A large bronze memorial called Monumentoal Encierro depicts a group of six bulls and ten runners in mid-flow, both as a dynamic celebration of the event and a tribute to the fifteen participants who've been fatally gored over the years, the last in 2009.
At 8am a firecracker announces that the bulls have been released from the corral, then the 850mdash starts with a fast uphill run towards Town Hall Square. A hormonal mêlée dressed in white and red is then pursued up a sidestreet and rounds Dead Man's Corner before a fast 300m straight along Calle de la Estafeta. The safest place to watch is from a balcony, many of which are hired out for the morning, or from the seats overlooking the arena in Plaza de Toros where the surviving participants end up. Only the bullrings in Mexico City and Madrid are larger. A digital clock outside a t-shirt shop counts down the time until the next bullrun takes place, in our case 326 days 20 hours and 41 minutes (or if you find the entire event wholly questionable displays how much longer remains for normal shopping).
The man who brought Pamplona's horned exploits to a wider audience was the writer Ernest Hemingway who attended San Fermin three times in the 1920s, on one occasion running himself. The experience inspired his novel The Sun Also Rises. The city celebrated his passion by erecting a grizzled statue outside the bullring, arms folded, and also named the adjacent street after him. A second statue, this time in bronze, can be found propping up the bar inside CaféIruña which faces the city's largest square. Hemingway liked a drink in the dazzling fin de siècle interior, but we had a lunch booking elsewhere so only got as far as the terrace out front where a grizzled old maid holds up the menu for tourists to peruse.
If bulls aren't your thing then the chief attraction in Pamplona is its fortifications. Ancient walls continue to defend the hilltop from approach by river, with all sorts of walkways and triangular bastions to explore. A much larger star-shapedfortress was built to the southwest, with five enormous points and a deep zigzag moat. It's called the Citadel and was initiated by King Philip II in the 1560s to defend, ultimately unsuccessfully, against the French outpost of Independent Navarre. 400 years later locals voted to turn it into a park, of which the lushest part is the interior where the old granary and 'oven' can still be seen. The zigzaggingmoat between the outer bastions is entirely separate, a peripheral hike of three-quarters a mile with minimal connectivity, so if the sun's beating down best stick up top.
One walled outpost of the Citadel now forms the centrepiece of Takonera Gardens, an elevated park created in 1830 in Belle Époque style. The sunkencentrepiece is a menagerie stocked with female deer, swans, turkeys and also several peacocks (some of whom we assumed were dead but it turned out they were just sprawled on the grass having a siesta). From the northern terrace there's a decent view of the elevated walls of Casco Antiquo and a much better view of the urban sprawl ancient Pamplona has evolved into. Like many Spanish cities the old boundaries restricted growth for centuries, in Pamplona's case until WW1 proved its defences were obsolete, after which substantial suburbs grew in all directions. For the best touristexperience stick to the centre where the bulls run.
We didn't get as much done in Pamplona as intended because it was bloody hot. Back in London that day people were whingeing about it being 38°C but we had 39°C and it was too fierce to be doing much. Apparently it's not normally like this, high temperatures being more the hallmark of the Spanish interior and the south, but that's climate-change tourism for you.
Pamplona is one of the stopping points on the Camino de Santiago, the extremely-long-distance pilgrimage route that ends at the great cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in western Spain. Not every pilgrim comes this way, there being multipleroutes across the Basque Country, but if you head inland along the Camino Francés rather than take the coastal Camino del Norte you'll pass through Pamplona 400 miles before reaching your ultimate destination. The Camino's not for the faint-hearted, but a proper pilgrimage never should be.
The Camino's symbol is the scallop shell, a common sight on the Galician coast, either the older literal version or the more modern yellow abstract. The pilgrimage only operates one-way so the shell acts as an arrow, always pointing in the right direction. In the countryside the markers might be a long way apart but in cities you spot them more frequently, even if you're not deliberately walking the route. My tally in Pamplona included two streetsigns by the Taconera Gardens, a fingerpost outside the Citadel and a scallop where the route enters the city at the Gate of France.
Most of the route is in deep countryside so when it hits a major urban centre many of the pilgrims make the most of the chance to stock up, stay somewhere that isn't a hostel and eat something less rustic. Up the hill by the cathedral I spotted a Camino supplies outlet (or maybe just a small souvenir shop cynically offering wares to travellers), into which tired souls weighed down by rucksacks were dribbling. It might also have been one of the eleven places in the city where you can get your Credential stamped, this the document you must get marked daily if you seek to complete the pilgrimage properly.
I'd hoped to walk some of the Camino while I was in Spain but precise routes are hard to find online, search engines generally offering instead the websites of tour companies over-keen to organise your pilgrimage. I thus only checked the routes properly after I got home, discovering that I had in fact walked eight short sections across four cities. The scallop above is from a 500m path through Parque Florida in Vitoria, one of my more intentional stretches. Vitoria is however only on the less-trodden Inland Basque Way which connects the two better-known trails across a high sierra.
Camino Vasco del Interior (in Vitoria-Gasteiz): 900m + 500m + 600m = 2.0km Camino del Norte (in San Sebastian):2.3km [my longest consecutive stretch] Camino del Norte (in Bilbao & Portugalete): 100m + 500m = 0.6km Camino Francés (in Pamplona): 50m + 50m = 0.1km[map]
My Pamplona contribution is particularly pathetic but it did bring my total to 5km precisely. You have to have walked at least 100km to claim your final Compostela (pilgrim certificate) at the cathedral so technically I only have 95km more to go. Don't hold your breath.
