Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 54: New Albanians on beer holiday in Old Albania (1994).
Albania was exhilarating and exhausting. For the next leg of Euro ’94, the flight plan led from Tirana to Zurich for a quick transfer, then on to Madrid, where we arrived late in the evening, pausing only for a night’s sleep before hopping a train to Pamplona. There’d be time for Madrid (and Toledo) before the flight home.
It was the first of four visits to the Fiesta de San Fermin during even-numbered years from 1994 through 2000. As enjoyable as the festival was, and as much as I cherish the friends and I made there, my interests ultimately were to be found elsewhere, and I haven’t returned since 2000.
Much of the following was written at the time, and appeared in the F.O.S.S.I.L.S. Travel Dog. I’ve altered and augmented a few passages to include information gleaned from the subsequent trips.
—
During my travels in Europe, I’ve been fortunate to witness a May Day parade in Vienna, frenetic all-night Greek political rallies, Munich’s fabled Oktoberfest, U2 performing live on stage in Ireland, selected soccer matches and two small but fascinating snippets of the Tour de France.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 was an epochal one-time celebration, requiring three decades of preparation and packing a visceral punch, but I missed that one, although only barely.
Running from July 6th through the 14th each year in Pamplona, Spain, the multi-faceted lunacy of the Festival of San Fermin tops them all.
Pamplona’s distinctive strain of craziness is a fascinating hybrid. Spectacular public displays of orgiastic, besotted and scatological indecency occur alongside demonstrations of a proud and dignified adherence to traditional values that extend too far back into time to be completely understood.
San Fermin is a primitive, almost mythological celebration expressed through daily, seemingly disparate, public and private set pieces. Confrontations between man and bull, gatherings of grandparents and grandchildren to share hot chocolate, outpourings of religious conviction, incessant marching musical mayhem and extraordinary alcoholic lubrication all suffice as demonstrative snapshots during festival days.
So it was even a century ago when an adventurous native of Oak Park, Illinois chose this tidy Spanish market town and its hitherto unknown local festival as the setting for the novel that made it (and him) famous. He was of course Ernest Hemingway, and his book was The Sun Also Rises. In it, Hemingway offered an enduring behavioral framework for self-aware but intelligent Anglo expatriates.
At Hemingway’s San Fermin, foreigners respectful of local color and tradition are contrasted with the ones who’ve crossed the sea for all the wrong reasons, unable to grasp why Pamplona is not similar to Peoria.
He also established drinking norms for several generations of travelers, and we can only imagine the effect on his contemporaries. Encumbered by the orthodoxies of Prohibition-era America, they read about incessant aperitifs at all hours, teeming sidewalk cafes and sweaty pitchers of cool lager beer under the hot Iberian sun.
The novel was published in 1926, and I hadn’t yet turned one year old when Hemingway died. But San Fermin remains gloriously intact, affording the opportunity to walk, talk and drink like Papa – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. Finally, cosplay that means something.
The morning hours provide the first major shock to those visitors craving normalcy, as huge beasts and eager humans take to the streets of oldest Pamplona to memorialize the death of the festival’s namesake patron saint, martyred by being dragged through the street by a bull. It goes without saying that they’d prefer not to stage a repeat performance.
Trouser Stains and Pavement Burns.
One thing is for certain. The greatest two minutes in sports do not take place at Louisville’s Churchill Downs each May.
The greatest two minutes – well, “few” minutes – in sports is Pamplona’s “Running of the Bulls,” the encierro, which takes place each morning for eight days during San Fermin. The six bulls to be featured in the evening’s bullfight, accompanied by six horned heifers for a total of twelve, are released into barricaded streets and driven 900 meters to their pens in the bull ring.
That’s a little more than half a mile. In the path of the bulls are thousands thrill-seeking festival-goers, some of whom are actually sober.
For many of the true believers, the morning run is a quasi-mystical experience that metaphorically represents mankind’s most primitive fears and primal urges, now buried in our collective subconscious, and brought to the surface during the mad daily race through the streets.
Other runners are simply unconscious, having been consumed, digested and expelled by the singular intensity and alcoholic promiscuity of the festival that never sleeps.
Late each evening, as the throngs of human celebrants eat and drink, and marching bands lead impromptu parades down the narrow streets past dancing and sleeping revelers, the following morning’s bulls are led to holding pens at the foot of street called Cuesta de Santo Domingo.
Early in the morning, workers begin assembling the barricades, wooden beams the size of railroad ties set into existing fence posts, thus enclosing the route of the running: Santo Domingo, into the small Plaza Consistorial, then a left turn onto Carrer Mercaderes, followed by a very hard right onto Calle de la Estafeta.
Estafeta accounts for roughly half the distance of the run, and it leads directly to the Plaza de Toros and the entrance to the bullring itself.
The hard right turn from Mercaderes onto Estafeta is the scene of many brutal collisions between man and beast (and, for that matter, man and man). The bulls often crash headlong into the particularly sturdy barrier erected at this turn before righting themselves to charge up the extremely narrow Estafeta straightaway, where numerous alcoves, waist-high windows and recessed doorways tempt the runners with visions of safe haven.
At about 7:30 a.m., cordons of police begin moving people, asleep or awake, from the route of the run. Once the human debris has been cleared, sanitation workers swiftly remove lingering piles of festival trash, sweep down the asphalt and scatter sawdust on the urine slicks that are an ever-present feature, both visually and aromatically, of a festival where many people drink and can’t always be bothered with portable WCs.
The viewpoint of the bulls obviously will never be known, but the human participants in the run generally can be divided into two groups. The vast majority wish only to be able to return home and tell their friends that they “ran with the bulls.”*
The others, including both native purists and foreign aficionados, actually seek to run with the bulls – near the powerful animals, alongside or just ahead – and to inject an element of strategic reckoning into what is essentially a scary business for all involved.
In order to separate the two groups, and to account for the huge numbers of “runners” involved, two waves of participants are sent to a starting position on Calle de la Estafeta beginning almost 2/3 of the way through the course. They jog a few yards into the bullring and declare victory, with the crunch reduced somewhat for the rest.
As such, these greatest few minutes in sports begins at 8:00 a.m. when a rocket explodes, signaling the release of the bulls from their pens. A second rocket sounds almost immediately, indicating that all the animals are off and running.
The bulls are driven by expert native runners, who wield canes and will use them if necessary – not on the bulls, but to lash those runners who attempt to touch the bulls or create problems that might lead to the animals becoming separated.
That’s because as long as the bulls stay together, at least loosely grouped and charging forward, the run proceeds fairly smoothly, with the greatest number of injuries occurring as a result of humans falling over each other. The situation can turn considerably nastier if a bull or bulls are separated. The massive animals may become annoyed and begin charging people with the object of ramming, goring and tossing them across the street with a flick of the head.
There have been at least a baker’s dozen fatalities since the 1920s, and serious injuries are recorded each year. It is said that three of the deaths came on one day when a group seeking safety in an Estafeta doorway was cornered by a single bull.
Still, when all factors are considered, running with the bulls probably isn’t much more dangerous than dodging drivers in America, as our fellow citizens chat on their cell phones, eat Rally Burgers or apply makeup while attempting to navigate a vehicle. Given the frequency with which distracted American drivers crash into storefronts these days, I’ll concede they’re more threatening than carefully bred, half-ton fighting bulls.
The running ends at the bullring. The bulls are driven into their pens to await their participation in the evening’s ritualistic bullfight, and the crowd of triumphant runners mills around the ring while additional throngs party in the stands. At intervals, heifers with sawed-off or padded horns are sent into the ring to wreak havoc among the drunken mass of exhilarated humanity.
Meanwhile, the aficionados are absent, having already adjourned to bars like the Txoko on the Plaza de Castillo for post-run champagne and lengthy analysis.
As for me, I never ran with the bulls. Neither did Hemingway (or so I’m told). There are three very good reasons why I haven’t joined the fun.
- First, I’d surely spill my drink, and that’s blasphemous.
- Second, I couldn’t run 900 meters drunk, sober or anywhere in between.
- Third, I’m a coward.
Sleeping’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Drink.
There is no beginning or end to anything during San Fermin, and there is nothing to compare to the absolute certainty that is experienced during Oktoberfest in Munich when the powers that be say YOU MUST LEAVE RIGHT NOW, and the whole festival ground closes up shop well before midnight.
However, for the sake of the narrative, I’ll say that a festival day in Pamplona begins with the running of the bulls and the post-run festivities (drinks and a light breakfast at a bar or coffee shop), continues through daylight hours filled with music, dancing, religious processions and endless carousing, pauses (maybe) for some semblance of a siesta or brief nap in mid-afternoon or while the evening’s bullfight takes place (always ending before dark, as there are no lights), then spills out onto the streets for eating, drinking and related activities until around midnight, when the nightly fireworks display announces the (end? beginning?), and people begin to consider going to eat their evening meal.
At some indefinable point shortly thereafter, everything dissolves into alcohol-driven chaos and one begins to see the sleeping bags tossed on any green spot not yet taken or urinated on. It is reputed that sex acts occur around this time, although I cannot personally verify it.
San Fermin’s credentials as a world-class party are indisputable and enduring, and yet it should be noted that despite everything that is thoroughly adult and often wretchedly dissipated about the eight-day festival, it remains an oversized family festival at heart.
Once I was walking through the Plaza Consistorial when the parade of the Gigantes (giant puppets representing different facets of the Pamplona experience) passed through, dazzling everyone present, but especially captivating the children, who were being energetically photographed and videotaped by their indulgent and equally excited parents.
Children in the official San Fermin uniform of white shirts and red scarves are everywhere, and their special milieu somehow co-exists with that of Euro Trash Nation that descends on Pamplona for the celebration. Such a coexistence surely couldn’t happen this way in America, but apart from occasional lapses it seems to work in Pamplona. Just don’t ask me how they balance the two.
Good food is available in abundance during the festival. I remember picnicking on cheese sandwiches in the comfortable shade of the trees in the park along the old town walls, and on another occasion indulged in still more fresh bread, chorizo, anchovy-stuffed olives and thin pepperoncini while watching an Andalusian troupe perform traditional song and dance near the Citadel, an old fortress upon whose grounds many of the younger celebrants.
Thanks to the discerning selections of my cousin Don and his friends, I’ve enjoyed several outstanding restaurant meals during San Fermin. At one meal we were fortunate to be seated next to an articulate, multilingual gentleman who attempted to explain the symbolic significance of the festival, of the running and the bullfight. As he spoke, he made short work of trucha con jamon (fried trout with serrano ham stuffed in the gills), a specialty of the Pyrenees between Pamplona and the French border.
One of our best meals was in a Basque social club (formerly the home of an extreme-left separatist movement), where we were taken by a couple of American veterans of Pamplona’s annual party wars.
The entrance was an open storefront where beer and snacks were being sold to passers-by. Behind it were several big partitions like those used in classrooms and offices, which bore inconspicuous, hand-lettered sheets of paper that announced the presence of the eatery behind the partitions, where communal tables sagged beneath the weight of steaming cauldrons of stew and colorful salad platters.
There and elsewhere, we were greeted by ample portions of mixed green salads with onions, tomatoes, black olives and tuna, white bean soup, ever-present baskets of crusty bread, hearty red wine, bacalao (dried, salted cod cooked in tomato sauce), and toro stew (rich beef stew purportedly containing the meat of the previous day’s fighting bulls).
Alcohol in varying forms was freely consumed, including cognac, champagne, wine and yes, even beer.
The Beer in Spain Comes Mainly Plain.
Hemingway wrote about Spanish beer in the glossary to his book about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon:
“Cerveza … draft beer is served in pint glasses called dobles or in half-pint glasses called canas, canitas or medias. The Madrid breweries were founded by Germans and the beer is the best anywhere on the continent outside of Germany and Czecho-Slovakia … in Pamplona the finest beer is at the Cafe Kutz and the Cafe Iruna. The beer at the other cafes cannot be recommended.”
On the other hand, Hemingway was not a beer writer.
During the 1990s, San Miguel, Mahou, Aguila and Estrella were the most commonly seen Spanish beers. All are mild, golden lagers; none have sufficient hop bite to justify status as pilsners. While in Pamplona, I’ve chosen San Miguel most often, both in bottles and on draft. It is malty, with just enough of a dry finish to avoid being cloying.
Each of the four mentioned above brews a lager of higher alcohol content (in the range of 5.5 – 6.5% by volume) that might be characterized as a Dortmunder/Export style.
I tried one of them, Aguila’s Master, and found it to be a fuller-bodied improvement over regular Aguila. Unfortunately, only the everyday lagers generally are found on draft in Spain, and the best that can be said of them is that they fill their limited purpose capably, especially on a hot day.**
Life and Death in the Bull Ring.
Once day, with nothing else to do and friends either socializing or actually in attendance at the evening’s bullfight, I stopped in a bar for beer and tapas. Fortunately, the bullfight was being televised, so I sat down to watch two of the six bulls and study the dynamics of the event. Perhaps owing to books like Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and James Michener’s Iberia, I was eager to go to the bullring, as we’d be doing the following evening.
The morning of bullfight day began with observing the run, and drinking began early at the Windsor, where many of the American aficionados gather to trade observations, pontifications and gossip.
My cousin Don’s French friend Christian, a passionate follower of the bulls, had just arrived from Montpelier, and he was just as eager as the rest of us to attend the bullfight that night. After a fantastic lunch at the venerable Mauleon restaurant near the bullring, Christian waded into the mob of ticket scalpers lining the Paseo Hemingway and emerged with tickets.
More preparatory consumption of beer and Patxaran (in Basque; in Spanish it’s Pacharán), the delicious sloe-flavored local aperitif, was undertaken, and in due time, our group entered the bullring and found our seats.
Much has been written about the Spanish cultural institution of the bullfight. Hemingway warned his readers to think of the bullfight not as a sport, but as a tragedy.
It is precisely as Papa said. When the bull, which has been bred and raised for four or five years for no other purpose than to make his one appearance in the ring, enters the arena, he is doomed to die.
The bull may take a human or two with him, less likely today than in the pre-penicillin era when even a minor goring might lead to a severe infection, but he will not live, and so it cannot be said that the bullfight is a contest between equals. However, it is a an event worth attending at least once.
In the modern bullfight, six bulls are fought and killed by three matadors, one at a time, for a total of two bulls each. In Pamplona during the festival, this action has as its backdrop a rowdy crowd in the cheap seats (those not shaded from the late afternoon sun), most of whom are drinking from buckets of sangria or liter bottles of beer or spraying their libations on those seated near or below them.
Before the bullfight, these white-shirted spectators stagger through the streets toward bearing their libations. After the bullfight, they stream out of the bullring toward the bars, now bathed in wet hues of pink and red.
The death of the bull is strictly choreographed, and nothing that precedes it happens without a reason.
At first, the bull is goaded into charging padded horses whose riders (picadors) use a long, bladed lance to work over the bull’s huge, humped neck muscle. Next, banderilleros dance like ballet dancers to the side of the bull, planting short shafts with harpoon points into the same muscle.
By weakening the bull’s upper neck to lower the animal’s head, these actions help to prepare the bull for the entrance of the matador, whose task it is to lead the bull through an artistic program of maneuvers with his capes and then to dispatch the tired, confused bull with the single thrust of a sword through the animal’s shoulder blades.
I am guilty of over-simplification in the preceding. As Hemingway wrote over a half-century ago:
“I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself. I thought they would be simple and barbarous … but the bullfight was so far from simple and I liked it so much that it was much too complicated for my then equipment for writing to deal with and, aside from four very short sketches, I was not able to write anything about it for five years – and I wish I would have waited ten. However, if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all.”
A few brief paragraphs just can’t do justice to the diverse elements and strategies of the bullfight.
Here is one example. At the very beginning, when the bull charges into the ring, a committee of banderilleros with large capes awaits to lead the animal through brief maneuvers. Soon the men flee, and the bull emerges “triumphant” from this first encounter, the purpose of which is to permit the matador to observe the animal’s behavioral patterns; how it charges, which horn it favors, and so on. The subsequent efforts of the picador and banderilleros are meant to correct the tendencies thus observed, and to regulate insofar as possible the bull’s physical bearing.
All these things occur without a scoreboard or a clock. The success of the matador and his associates is judged by the paid customers in the stands (the fans, in American lingo), who applaud or jeer accordingly, and sometimes do much worse.
In Hemingway’s day, these matters could easily lapse into violence. He explained his feelings about two detestable bullring servants in Death in the Afternoon:
“These two that I speak of are both fat, well-fed and arrogant. I once succeeded in landing a large, heavy one-peseta-fifty rented, leather cushion alongside the head of the younger one during a scene of riotous disapproval in a bull ring in the north of Spain and I am never in the ring without a bottle of Manzanilla (dry sherry wine) which I hope yet I will be able to land, empty, on one or the other at any time rioting becomes so general that a single bottle stroke may pass unperceived by the authorities.
“After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it.”
The Bull’s End.
To kill properly, the matador must use his muleta (a special, smaller cape) to lower the bull’s head and expose the point of impact, then skillfully bury the sword in a small target area while avoiding the potentially fatal goring that might be inflicted by a horn should the bull raise his head at the wrong instant.
None of the six bulls I saw were killed cleanly; there were no perfect thrusts of the sword to drop the animal instantly.
In 1932, Hemingway was complaining about the lack of great killers among Spain’s matadors, and Michener echoed these thoughts in the 1960s, adding that in his many years of attending bullfights he had never witnessed one in which all aspects of the confrontation had been performed to perfection.
In 1994, I did not come away from the bullring in Pamplona with any major misgivings as to the cruelty of the institution of bullfighting, instead rationalizing that the torture inflicted on the bull prior to his death is of brief duration, and certainly there would be as much or more suffering if the animal were being prepared for beefsteak production rather than a public execution.
Those bulls judged to be of fighting quality enjoy a four- to five-year lifespan that is as idyllic and undisturbed as any in the animal kingdom, and if you’re wondering, the characteristics of the fighting bull are transmitted through the animal’s mother, thus serving the purpose when the most successful products of breeding science must die at the peak of their performance.
30 years later, my view remains that anyone critical of bullfighting who also regularly eats meat might profit from speculating on the methodology of the slaughterhouse before decrying the death of the fighting bull. But having said this, I’ve no fervent desire to attend another bullfight. I’m also eating considerably less meat than before.
The End of the San Fermin Experience.
After the bullfight ended, the sun was setting over the streets of Pamplona and the waning hours of San Fermin as we exited the bullring and walked along with the crowd toward the Mauleon, the aficionado’s restaurant and bar where we had eaten earlier.
Many people were chatting and drinking in the streets that cross in front of the entrance. I said goodbye to Don and his friends, downed a bit of the bubbly that poured freely, then returned to our room to pack and prepare for the early train to Madrid the following morning.
As it turns out, there is an end to San Fermin.
It comes when you’re leaning against your bag at the bar of the train station buffet, sipping coffee and watching an old man next to you swallow his morning brandy, and you realize that you’re still wearing the emblematic bright red scarf.
You think about removing it, and then remember what a good time it was, so you say the hell with it, and when the train sidles up to the platform, you begin thinking about next time, as I have been. I’d like to return, but not necessarily during the festival’s run.
Rather, it’d be interesting to experience the pleasant city and surrounding scenic areas during a placid, normal time.
—
* The author has no direct experience of the encierro during contemporary phone camera and ballcapcam era, preferring the relative simplicity and innocence of the 1990s.
** As you’d imagine, global-standard-issue craft beer is now a “thing” in Pamplona. Those classic Spanish lagers might be boring by comparison, but I’m not ready for “IPA in the Afternoon” during San Fermin.
