Annual Madness

Uno de enero, dos de febrero, tres de marzo, cuatro de abril,

cinco de mayo, seis de junio, siete de julio, San Fermín.

Thus begins one of the most beloved songs of the town of Pamplona, in Navarra. San Fermín has put the town in the international spotlight for hundreds of years. Few people now know anything about the saint, and think they know everything about his celebration. 

It began, as so many festivals have done across this land, as a cattle fair, way back in the fourteenth century. The religious celebration was changed from October to July to join with the cattle fair a couple of hundred years later. There are two versions to Fermín's martyrdom. One is that he was beheaded in Amiens in 303 A.D. The other is that he was dragged through the streets with a bunch of angry bulls running after him and goring him. Anything will do to Christianize an originally pagan tradition. Most likely, running before the bulls came from the same area as bullfighting, in the Eastern Mediterranean, and as a rite of passage of some kind. But it's easy to get addicted to the adrenaline rush, so it continues.

It was already internationally known in the eighteenth century, and already complaints were lodged against licentious foreigners who felt quite uninhibited with the wine and the adrenaline. But it got into the newspapers and modern imagination thanks to Ernest Hemingway, a writer enamored of Spain, and especially of Pamplona and the bull fights. Between the first time he attended the fiesta in 1923, and the last in 1959, he went many times to Pamplona and its sanfermines. He even used the festival as part of the plot of The Sun Also Rises. It was such an important part of the plot that the book was published as ¡Fiesta! in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries. 

The most famous aspect of the festival, though, only lasts about three minutes. Three minutes of overcrowded streets along which some fifteen bulls are goaded into running. And three minutes of thousands of idiots trying to grab a bull by the horn or by the tail, even knowing it's against the rules and they can be barred from running the next day. Three minutes of dumb statues standing where they shouldn't as murderous hoofs thunder by. Three minutes of trying to snap a picture of an angry bull charging at the clueless picture taker, even though it's been banned. Three minutes in which almost every year some tourist with no idea what he's gotten into, is gored or even killed.

And while the running of the bulls attracts thousands of onlookers and participants, not all of those like what follows. The running is merely to lead the bulls from a pen where they have been gathered, to the bullring in town. Where the bullfights are held. And against which hundreds of people clamor at the beginning of the festival every year. 

Others join the merrymaking because they think it's a free-for-all. There are some who think all the wine and alcohol mean a woman walking along in a wine-reddened t-shirt, braless, at four o'clock in the morning wants to be groped and treated like a piece of meat. Those are the guys that want to spend the rest of the festival in the slammer. There are also those who spend the entire week in an alcoholic fuzziness, thinking the festival wouldn't get along without them, and even try to join the running. Then they complain that the police, who don't allow them anywhere near the bulls, are spoilsports instead of thanking them for saving their boozy lives. 

Of course, there's also the regular people who merely go to enjoy themselves and to participate in the most important aspect of a Spanish festival: eating. Entire families or groups of friends, wearing white t-shirts and red bandanas, dance to the music of charangas in the streets, and spend most of the afternoon eating the traditional, loooong lunch of a feast day. Then they dance some more during the evening and night, after eating supper, and retire way into the wee hours of the morning. 

That's the best way to celebrate.