Pamplona, Spain: Not Hemingway’s Bullfighting Cliché
Winding my way back home to southern Spain after seeing Paris and northern France over Christmas break, I passed through the Basque lands surrounding both sides of the western Pyrenees mountains. I loved San Sebastián and had a good time in Bilbao , so it seemed like a no-brainer to visit Pamplona in the neighboring region of Navarra. The city is (in)famous for its annual San Fermín festival every July, which involves an encierro de toros , the Running of the Bulls. This kind of event isn’t unique to the festival—tiny villages here in southern Spain will have their own encierros held in their small plazas—but the one in Pamplona is probably the most significant, popularized by the romanticizing author Ernest Hemingway in his works like The Sun Also Rises . Pamplona’s old town But I passed through the town in January, about as off-season as it gets. What could there possibly be to see and do here outside of the excitement (read: stupidity) of running down the street with ...