I'm overwhelmingly glad to be visiting the former and not the latter. Not just because doing so is about fifty times cheaper, but because frankly I think the whole bull-running thing is just colossally stupid, even while I concede that the festival as a whole must be quite a spectacle. And the vaunted bravery of the participants is somewhat overstated. Only fifteen people have been killed since official records began in 1910. That's about the same as the number of fatalities in Yosemite National Park every single year.
The festival ends, as you might expect, with a big bullfight. Notwithstanding my disdain for the whole thing, I suppose I'd be interested to attend a corrida just for the sake of trying to understand its appeal. Sadly the bullfighting season doesn't start until summer and I'll probably be back in a job by then. It's an experience that will just have to wait.
A different experience came my way in a very sudden and unexpected fashion, at 7.43am on Friday March 10th. Specifically, a magnitude 4.3 earthquake, with its epicentre just a few miles away. It woke me up abruptly, in my room on the fourth floor of a rickety old hotel - not the best place to be during an earthquake - and for a moment it felt like the whole hotel was about to fall down. Thankfully it didn't. There was a smaller and shorter aftershock the same day at 4.21pm, just as I was taking my first sip of a beer in a bar downtown. All very exciting.
It's really quite bizarre how few tourists I've encountered in Pamplona. (Maybe the whole world assumes that Pamplona is good only for bull-running? Maybe everyone else already knew about the earthquakes?) I almost felt a bit self-conscious about walking around with a camera. I giggled inwardly at the locals for wearing winter boots and coats when it's 25 degrees C outside, but the flipside is that the locals were probably giggling inwardly at the weirdo ginger foreigner in shorts and sandals. As is so often the case.
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| Plaza del Castillo |
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| Town Hall |
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| By the cathedral walls. Note the absence of people. I like it. |
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| Palacio de Navarra |
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| The bullfighting arena |
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| When Ernest Hemingway was covering the bull-running in Pamplona in the 1930s... ...this is where he used to come for a kebab. Presumably. |
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| San Fermin chapel |
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| Edd vs Food #56 Bar Casa Jesus Mari, Calle San Agustin 21, Pamplona. Pasta salad...containing just about enough mayo to be getting on with. Unfortunately the Spanish seem to be very keen on sweetcorn. |
