Bill Hillmann: Chicago Bull-Runner of Pamplona

Pamplona, San Fermín and the Running of the Bulls

Picture a hushed April afternoon on the Plaza del Castillo, Pamplona's main square, and it is difficult to imagine how the city reinvents itself three months later. Yet at these same café tables at Café Iruña, ninety years ago, Ernest Hemingway watched the fiesta burst into life and described it better than anyone: at noon on Sunday July 6th, he wrote, the festival simply exploded.

Each July roughly a million visitors pour into Navarre's capital for the feria of San Fermín — a city whose everyday population is under 200,000. The world has plenty of great festivals, from Rio's Carnival to Munich's Oktoberfest to New Orleans' Mardi Gras, but only one begins each day with a stampeding herd of Spanish fighting bulls racing through its main streets, alongside — or sometimes carried on their horns — the very brave, the very foolish, the very drunk, and the few who genuinely know what they are doing because they come back year after year.

Spain stages hundreds of ferias every year, almost all of them involving bulls, but there is only one Feria del Toro: San Fermín in Pamplona. The country's biggest bulls are brought here and, following an ancient tradition, let out of their corrals at 8 a.m. daily from July 7th to July 14th. They follow a fenced route up the steep calle Santo Domingo, across the Plaza de Ayuntamiento, along calle de los Mercaderes, around the sharp right-angle corner known as la curva, down calle Estafeta, around the gentler bend called teléfonos, into the bullring's entry tunnel across the callejón, and out onto the sand, where men with capes — many of them former bullfighters — catch their attention and steer them safely into the ring's corrals.

In barely half a mile — some 800 metres, sometimes covered by the cattle in under two minutes, sometimes terrifyingly and agonisingly longer if they split up and turn as dangerous as only a suelto, a loose bull, can be — this city defines itself.

Bulls cresting the curve of calle Estafeta during the Pamplona encierro — The bulls crest the curve of calle Estafeta (Photo: Jim Hollander)

Young runner in training for the running of the bulls — In training from an early age (Photo: Jim Hollander)

Scene from the Pamplona bull-run and fiesta — The streets of Pamplona during San Fermín

How This Guide Came About

When the editor first came to Pamplona in 2009, he was researching a bigger book on the world of Spanish bulls and had already stood in the ring with two-year-old animals — small, quarter-ton beasts used to train bullfighters. A celebrated matador, Juan José Padilla, promised to teach him how to run, but pulled out (understandably, having been gored in a bullfight days earlier), so he arrived alone with no idea what to expect. No guidebook at the time explained how to survive it.

Hemingway, who never ran the bulls himself, set his first strikingly beautiful novel here — The Sun Also Rises, published in the UK as Fiesta — and wrote two fine non-fiction books on the bulls, Death In The Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer. All three were read, but, literary respect aside, they proved about as useful as a violin in a gunfight. So he took an afternoon train from Barcelona, checked into a hotel near the entry point to the encierro, completed his 'uniform' of white shirt, trousers and trainers with a red sash and neckerchief, and had a drink with an American friend, an amateur bullfighter from the New York City Club Taurino, who explained what lay ahead. The chapter of his book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, describes what happened next.

So if you have never fought a bull and have no bullfighting friends, how are you supposed to handle this madness and come out alive? That question ran through his head many times, even as he ran bulls again and again and fought larger and larger ones, culminating in killing a three-year-old weighing a third of a ton. If that troubles your ethics, read on — there is more to come, and not all of it pro-bullfighting. There is no propaganda here.

This year a group came together — all the others knowing Pamplona far better than the editor — to produce this little book.

The Contributors

The editor is a British writer and broadcaster who has run bulls, fought bulls, written books on bulls and discussed them from The Times of London to The New York Times to The Hindustan Times in India, and from the BBC to CNN to Al-Jazeera. He authors the bullfighting blog The Last Arena and edits The Pamplona Post.

John Hemingway, like his grandfather Ernest, is an author, including of Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir. Hemingway senior may have 'discovered' Pamplona for the English-speaking world ninety years ago, but John remains the only member of his family ever to run with the bulls.

Joe Distler, a lecturer in English literature from New York, is the greatest non-Spanish bull-runner of all time and the only recorded person to run every encierro in Pamplona — eight each San Fermín — from 1967 to 2012: 368 runs in Pamplona alone. He also contributed a chapter on running in other towns in Appendix II.

Bill Hillmann is a Chicago Golden Gloves-winning boxer — Hemingway's old sport in Hemingway's old town — a Chicago Tribune journalist and author, and one of the most experienced young English-speaking bull-runners on the streets today.

Jim Hollander came here to run before any of them, in 1962, and although he gave up running after a fatally grim year in '77, which he describes below, he has photographed every encierro since, taking time off from his day job covering everything from Middle East warzones to the London Olympics as senior photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA), to whom we owe great thanks for allowing us to republish so many of their back catalogue of Jim's photos. He also authored the photographic book Run To The Sun: Pamplona's Fiesta de San Fermín.

The editor has also translated words of advice from four of the most noted bull-runners of Pamplona and the rest of Spain — with over ten thousand encierros of experience between them — because none of the writing ever read on the subject in English has asked these men what they think, or represented their views and their hard — indeed bloodily — earned wisdom. So these four Anglo-Saxon writers, as the Spanish call us, are balanced by Julen Madina from San Sebastián, Miguel Ángel Eguiluz from Pamplona, Jokin Zuasti from Pamplona and Josechu Lopez from Cuéllar. And to counterbalance Jim Hollander, there are photos from Nicolás Haro from Seville, a frequent collaborator, photographer for Into The Arena, and whose family, Fernández de Córdoba, used to breed fighting bulls themselves.

One other great American was often seen in Pamplona: Orson Welles, the titan of cinema who produced, wrote, directed and starred in perhaps the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane. Included is his daughter Beatrice's account to the editor of the first time she accompanied her father here. And to maintain the Anglo-Spanish balance, the book opens with a foreword from the Mayor of Pamplona.

Final Words of Advice

The editor's own closing advice is simple: if you want to guarantee you survive running the bulls, stay off the street and watch from a balcony. There is far more to Spain's ultimate fiesta, its 'feast', than defying your own fear of death or proving to everyone else that you have none. If that is your aim, then, in the words of our friend Larry Belcher — Texan rodeo champion turned bull-runner extraordinaire — 'strap on your back-pack and get t…'

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Bill Hillmann brings a boxer's discipline and a journalist's eye to the streets of Pamplona, and his chapter in this guide reflects both. Whether you are reading to understand the encierro or preparing to run it yourself, his experience — and the advice gathered from Pamplona's most seasoned runners — offers a grounded starting point.