Running with the Bulls

The first leg of our trip back to London took us over 600km north to Pamplona. With relatively few cars for company on quite new motorways that cut across the planes of Spain we made good progress, directed in firm but polite Spanish by the voice of Maria on the Tom-Tom. Her directions have reduced my role as navigator but she doesn't do interesting facts about the places we visit nor spout trivia about the local football teams, so I'm not completely redundant!

Pamplona has been on the pilgrim route to Santiago in Galicia and been capital of Navarre (first as independent kingdom and then part of Spain) for more than a Millenium. It therefore has a more cosmopolitan and prosperous feel than you might expect for a Spanish city of its size and has some impressive defences such as the high city walls above a loop in the river and the military fort, the citadel, now used mostly for art exhibitions.  Despite the current economic crisis there are an incredible number of bars and restaurants in operation and a lot of up market shops. The people walk faster than in southern Spain and, like us, don't wait for the green man before crossing roads. 

The city is well known for its tapas (known as pintxos here - typically finger food instead of the dishes in sauce you get in the rest of Spain) and we had a recommendation from Pau who spent five years here as a student and knows a bit about food. His favourite, El Gaucho, turned out to be less than 20 paces from our hotel entrance and yet we found another good bar on the way to it!  The quality of the food in both was excellent which bodes well for the rest of the mini road trip we are doing while refueling here in the Basque country ahead of the journey through France. 

But Pamplona is really famous for Los Encierros - the running of the bulls through the streets. Each year beginning on 7 July for a week during the fiesta of San Fermín, at 8am every morning the six bulls who are to fight that evening are released and run the course to the bull ring in around three minutes in hot pursuit of a host of brave/stupid humans.  Most runs pass without major incident but from time to time everyone gets a reminder of how dangerous this is. A couple of years ago while we watched live on TV, a light brown bull named Cappuccino ran amok and gored various unfortunates, cheered on by Suzanne who is always one for the underdog. On a quiet spring evening there is no such excitement but there are enough traces of San Fermín to entice one back to Pamplona to visit one of Spain's greatest occasions before someone in the EU closes it down on health and safety grounds.