Can the cruelty of San Fermin’s legendary bull-running festival be ignored any longer?

With Pamplona’s controversial and bloody festivities in full swing, David Barnett explores the fascinating, yet troubling, nature of this annual event

Running with bulls in Pamplona: the Basque region is a bastion for bullfighting (Getty)

It was, said Ernest Hemingway in a letter to his old friend Howie Jenkins, “the goddamdest wild time and fun you ever saw. Everybody in town lit for a week, bulls racing loose through the streets every morning, dancing and fireworks all night.”

Hemingway wrote that just about 95 years ago, upon witnessing his very first festival of San Fermin in the mountain town of Pamplona, in the heart of Spain’s Basque region. San Fermin starts every year on 6 July and runs until the 14^th of the month, and the spirit of Hemingway’s breathless description of 1924 pretty much still holds today.

San Fermin is many things. It is a religious festival, in honour of the titular saint who is said to have been the son of a Roman senator who converted to Christianity in the third century. It is one long party, that draws people from across the globe for a week of drunken debauchery. It is a spectacle of parades featuring gigantic puppets with grotesquely oversized heads. But for most people, Pamplona and San Fermin means just one thing: the running of the bulls.