On the first full day of the Fiesta of San Fermin, the corredores streamed by the thousands to the old quarter.
Dressed in white pants and white shirts, with red sashes around their waists and red scarves around their necks, the chanting, staggering, hung-over survivors of a night fueled by false courage paraded past the sangria-satiated bodies littering the city’s grass to the narrow cobblestone streets exploding with life.
The running of the bulls called pilgrims from all over Europe and the Americas. In the dim early morning, they congregated at the crest of the Santo Domingo rise. They jammed Plaza Consistorial beneath the looming walls of Town Hall. They lined Calle Mercaderes. The runners danced to brass bands, sang and prayed. Prayed for true courage during their run.
The event, first popularized beyond the nation’s borders by Ernest Hemingway in his novel “The Sun Also Rises,” attracts daredevils from around the world to this city of 200,000 people in the Basque region of northern Spain for nine days each July. San Fermin, reputed to be the community’s first bishop, was martyred in the 1st Century A.D., and his feast day has been celebrated on July 7 since 1591.
The tradition of running with the bulls, or the encierro, dates to 1867, and something in the risky ritual continues to speak to the restlessness in men’s souls. Runners come for adventure, for thrills, to test their nerve on a dash that typically lasts about three minutes. It is estimated 1.5 million people attend some portion of the festival. On a weekend day, 4,000 of them run with the bulls. On a weekday, 2,000.
A tall wooden fence separates corredores and spectators. It is a thin line, but the margin of safety. At 8 a.m. each day, at the signal explosion of a rocket, both bulls and fools rush in to create a goulash of mayhem and madness.
“It’s just something you’ve got to cross off the list,” said Scott Toth, 39, of Chicago, an employee of a small Internet software company who ran for the first time this year.
The festival pays homage to San Fermin, with formally attired priests leading a religious processional through city streets. But it is also characterized by a bacchanalian scale, 24/7, street-partying, imbibing frenzy. The fiesta is Mardi Gras with animals, and municipal workers spent the festival pushing brooms and wielding high-pressure hoses to cleanse the ground. There was more glass around than at a Dale Chihuly exhibit.
The running of the bulls may be done on a lark, but it is no joke. The slippery, twisting route is barely more than a half-mile, but it is pockmarked with danger. Galloping half-ton beasts armed with steak-knife-sharp horns, a bad attitude and the speed of a thoroughbred horse, mingle with scrambling, frightened, adrenaline-pumped humans.
Since this course was established in 1922, there have been 13 deaths and more than 200 goring incidents. The last to die was Matthew Tassio, 22, from Glen Ellyn, Ill., in 1997–the only non-Spanish fatality.
Threading a gauntlet of passed-out revelers splattered with red wine, a perhaps too-sober Toth endured a moment of trepidation.
“What am I doing?” he asked.
Too late for introspection, he was going inside the fence.
Action at the fence
At Plaza Consistorial, the crowd was a seething, swaying, roaring mass. Those white-and-red clad runners squeezed together as fans strained for position and police swept away–sometimes with slaps to the head–anyone anchored in the wrong place.
Marty Hirsch, 42, a Chicago attorney, followed protocol the night before the first run, walking the route, studying the fences to determine where he could flee if a bull charged.
“This is not a problem,” he said, viewing the wide-slatted fencing. “I can get over this if I need to.”
Runner’s etiquette, carefully spelled out in printed material and in announcements made in Spanish, English, German, French and Basque, calls for civilized behavior. In reality runners jumped the fences instead of entering authorized gates, were too drunk for their own good, and shoved other corredores aside.
“There are no rules,” Hirsch said.
Spectators who paid dear prices (90 euros, equivalent to $90) to rent space on wrought-iron balconies stood overhead as a chant of “Ole! Ole! Ole!” erupted from those assembled in the square. Then, in Spanish, the corredores beseeched the heavens: “We ask San Fermin as our patron to guide us through the bull run and give us his blessing.”
Precisely at 8, a rocket boomed and the six 1,200-pound bulls on the card for the night’s matadors, accompanied by a half-dozen steers, burst from their corral. Chaos.
Bulls slipped, sprawled on all fours, skidded across the pavement. Corredores, waving rolled up newspapers, ran alongside, some even patting the bulls’ flanks. Many fell. Runners who tumble are supposed to cover up until the bulls have passed.
Running the bulls from the corral to the Plaza de Toros mimics the old-style transfer of bulls from pasture to bull-ring. Herders bearing long sticks trail the bulls, prodding them. As soon as the last bull enters, the stadium gates slam shut and the run ends.
This day the bulls separated. Some stopped running. Some turned and chased corredores. Boceto, a cantankerous bull, fell several times. He turned horns on runners, ducked his huge head, and flipped them airborne. The encierro lasted more than seven minutes.
“They say it is more dangerous on the weekend,” said Maria Jose Garea, a Pamplona resident who works for a tourism company. “But it’s better to have a broken bone than be killed, no? Tourists will try to test the bull and go, `Hey, I’m here.’ That’s not the way to do it. It’s stupid.”
For most tourists the run with the bulls is a one-year fling, but if you grow up male in Pamplona, ongoing peer pressure is intense.
Miguel Lopez, 24, a lifelong Pamplona resident, knows it.
“I tried to run four times,” Lopez said.
Twice the police pulled him out of the street because they thought he was too drunk. Twice, waiting in the crowd with a friend, they got nervous. They lied to the police–“We’re drunk! We’re drunk!”–to escape.
One other deterrent for Lopez: his mother is a nurse who said if she sees him in the emergency room what she will do to him is “more painful than the goring.”
The bulls and the corredores sprinted along the winding streets, and entering a chute leading to the stadium, passed a huge bust of Hemingway erected in 1968 to commemorate his contributions to the community. Some Pamplona residents wonder if Hemingway gets too much credit, but showing his enduring appeal, hardcover, Spanish copies of “The Sun Also Rises” sold briskly during the festival.
Hirsch, who has sampled other adventures like sky diving and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, and joked that he trained for the run by dodging cars in Chicago, stayed on his feet without bumping a bull.
“Standing there, body to body, I wasn’t really scared,” Hirsch said. “If there were [only] five of us, I would have been scared. But what are the odds? It was over so fast.”
Too fast for Lana Leone, too, one of at least a dozen Chicagoans in Pamplona. An account executive for a German chemical company, she came to Spain with the notion of running–still a rarity among women, who until recently were banned. She changed her mind but then was shunted aside by police and squished by fans.
“I didn’t see a thing,” she said.
It amounted to attending Woodstock and not hearing the music. But not to worry: Encierro replays were shown on local TV all day. A Spanish man, an Australian man, and an American woman were gored. Later reporters conducted hospital bedside interviews with the wan casualties.
“It’s a miracle more are not killed,” Lopez said.
Battling a cow
The running of the bulls is the main course. The suelta de vaquillas, or freeing of the cows, is dessert. Rambling with the cows rewards the quick runners who reach the Plaza de Toros.
As hundreds of runners milled about on the yellow sand, high-fiving each other in an orgy of self-congratulation, the snorting bulls were penned to await duels with matadors.
Then a lone cow, weighing probably two-thirds as much as a fighting bull, was set loose in the ring. The craziest corredores sat in the cow’s path and it plowed through them. The cow’s large horns were covered with soft tape so no one was gored.
Emboldened corredores tried to ride the cow. Some imitated matadors, waving articles of clothing. The cow darted back and forth, slamming into bodies, head-butting the foolish. Another cow emerged. The scene was repeated–and again. For a half-hour it was kindergarten recess as 19,500 spectators roared.
Hirsch made it into the stadium, and successfully ducked the cows.
“I didn’t feel like taking a horn ride,” he said.
Toth did not run fast enough. He was about 50 feet short when the doors shut. But long after his heart was pumping.
“It was an awesome experience,” Toth said. “This makes the Taste of Chicago look like a backyard barbecue. I’ve never seen anything like this. But it could never happen in the U.S. Public drinking, sleeping in parks, liability insurance. There would be 20 lawsuits the first day.”
Not in Pamplona. In Pamplona, the wine flows, the bands play, and men and bulls still mix freely in the streets with the blessing of a long-dead saint.
