Pamplona overrun with thrill-seeking tourists

Each year the small Spanish town is transformed by fans of the running of the bulls.

By DAVID ADAMS

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 9, 2000

PAMPLONA, Spain -- For some it's a rite of passage. For others it's a ritual gathering place where lifelong friendships have been forged.

And for some it is a Hemingway-esque love affair with bulls and bullfighting.

Whatever the reason, every year in the second week of July, they descend on Pamplona, home of one of the world's most popular fiestas.

"It's the only place I know I can come back to over and over and have my expectations met," said Ray Mouton, a New Orleans writer who has been making the annual pilgrimage for 30 years.

For eight days, this small town in the northeast of Spain's Basque country is transformed. A quiet backwater the rest of the year, Pamplona is invaded by hundreds of thousands of tourists, all drawn by the lure of wine, revelry and the "running of the bulls."

Each morning at 8 a rocket sounds and the six animals due to fight in that afternoon's bullfight are herded through narrow streets from the corral to the bullring.

Running with the bulls dates back to the 16th century and is part of the Festival of San Fermin, a local saint beheaded for his religious beliefs in 434 A.D.

What began as the annual commercial fair grew into its present-day format when bullfighting was introduced. "The young boys were so exuberant about it that they ran along with the bulls in the street," said Mouton, who has researched the fiesta's evolution for a book he is writing, titled Run to the Sun. But it didn't gain worldwide attention until Ernest Hemingway popularized it in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

After 14 years of coming to Pamplona, Tom Turley, 35, of New York, is considered one of the best overseas runners. He comes for the thrill. "I'm an adrenaline junkie," he said.

He once attached himself to a heart rate monitor as he watched a run. "It hit 180 and I wasn't even running." Every year, there are the inevitable casualties, often caused by a night of excessive drinking and no sleep. Most years there are an average of 10 to 12 gorings in addition to broken bones and scrapes when people fall down and get trampled by the bulls.

In 1995, 30 people were hurt, including Matthew Tassio, 22, from Chicago, who died after being gored in the stomach.

While all come for the running of the bulls, few become bullfight enthusiasts. "I don't knock bullfighting," said Rex Freriks, a doctor from Texas who started coming to Pamplona in 1986 when stationed at a U.S. Air Force base in Britain.

"I only went to a bullfight one time and I didn't care to see the bull killed like that," he said.

Others defend bullfighting as a natural ritual pitting man's intelligence against the brute strength of the animal, and a metaphor for life.

Hemingway, who compared bullfighting to appreciating good wine, also wrote, "the bull is a wild animal whose greatest pleasure is combat and which will accept combat offered to it in any form." It is often pointed out that fighting bulls are reared for four years virtually in the wild on large, open ranches, exposed to only minimum human contact.

"I defend it as an art form, as important as music and painting, with a difference, it's an ephemeral art that is gone in a moment," said Juan Pedro Domecq, one of Spain's top breeders of toros bravos. He places it alongside flamenco dancing as a traditional display of spontaneity and improvisation, part of the characteristics that distinguish the Mediterranean people.

Over the years Pamplona has become a victim of its success. Every day street cleaners clear away the piles of rubbish and broken bottles, hosing down sidewalks soaked in spilled alcohol and urine.

Despite the drunkenness and debauchery, even traditionalists seem to have few complaints.

"Of all the places that Hemingway loved that have become modernized and a mecca for tourists, Pamplona remains the most unchanged," Mouton said.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.