Pamplona, home of San Fermin

Pamplona was founded by Pompey in 75 BC as a Roman camp, since then it has always been a reference point throughout the history of the north of Spain. Nowadays Pamplona is known everywhere as the world’s capital of happiness each year from the 6th to the 7th of July during the celebrations of one of Pamplona’s patron saints, San Fermin.

The celebration of San Fermin

The origin of this fiesta is lost in the midst of time. There are chronicles from the XIIIth and XIVth centuries which already mention the sanfermines although their worldwide fame had yet to wait until they were immortalized by American Nobel Prize author Ernest Hemingway in his book The sun also rises in 1926. The festival of San Fermin is a mixture of the official and the popular, the religious and the profane, local people and outsiders, the old and the new, order and chaos.

The sanfermines (as the festival is known in Spanish) offer the visitor an open and hospitable festival where anything out of the ordinary is welcomed and soon becomes part of the tradition, so long as it shows the respect due to others. The Sanfermines is a fiesta where no one is an outsider, everyone is equal and in which the festive spirit is never broken, centered on the people of Pamplona in the widest sense: all the people who are in the city during the always too short 204 hours of revelry, dancing, prayers and bacchanalian extravagance.