France & Spain Road Trip, Part 4, Pamplona

Pamplona, the capital city of Navarre inextricably linked with bull fighting and Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway visited every year from 1923 - 1927 for San Fermin, the annual orgy of bullfighting, blood, booze and ballads when the city bursts at the seams from sheer numbers.  Indeed if it were not for him would Pamplona and its festival have gained the status it enjoys?

Hemmingway Kebabs

Hemmingway Drank Here

Walk the city and cafes, restaurants, shops etc are named in his memory with claims of his patronage, indeed the challenge would be to find a bar where he didn't drink! All this was very appropriate as I was reading working my way through For Whom The Bell Tolls.  Cafe Iruna on Plaza del Castillo is credited with being his regular haunt, and it would have been mine too. A beautifully preserved 19th century building with many original features. The nearby 5 star Hotel la Perla was his hotel of choice when in town.

Cafe Iruna Interior

We stayed in the rather more humble 1 star Hotel Castillo de Javier on nearby Calle San Nicolas, It offers a bar, free wifi, breakfast, a good shower and a bed for the night, it also made no claims to Hemingway association what so ever, perfect.  The hotel is slap bang in the middle of a narrow pedestrianised street packed with bars, cafes, restaurants, hotels. And a church.

La Mandarra de La Ramos

Local art

Too late for mass, we settled on a pub crawl.  Such was the amount of bars on the street you could go on a crawl and not lose site of the hotel door!  We'd arrived late Sunday afternoon and the bars were busy with diners and families.  One bar was offering chuleton (a kilo of steak, served rare and sprinkled with rock salt) with a bottle of wine for €55.  A young couple beside me ordered it.  The steak was bigger then the young woman, I'm not sure where she managed to put her share. This being Basque country the bars were offering a wonderous selection of pintxos (tapas) for about €2 to have with your drink.  Mrs L had heard about La Mandarra de La Ramos, seeing as it was on our street it would have been rude not to call in.

A busy bar with a healthy selection of jamon hanging from the ceiling.  Hanging from the walls was a very different attraction.  Paintings by a local artist of the famous bulls made a colourful and interesting background. The artist applies the paint directly from tubes to the canvas, clearly talented.

Game of Thrones, Pamplona

Basque Beer

We went for a post pintxos stroll through the old town.  There was some sort of festival going on with various street markets promoting local produce and crafts.  Many were in costume and there was a Game of Thrones feel to the whole thing.  

Turning a corner on to Plaza del Castillo, we're not sure how, we found ourselves out side Bar Txoko (pictured above) which rather uniquely laid claim to Hemingways patronage.  We stepped in to be greeted by bad, and loud, Spanish rock music which seem to be for the sole pleasure of the under worked waiter.  Ernest would not have approved.  The highlight of the visit was the selection of beer from San Sebastian which I had sampled on previous trips. On that high note we retired for the night. 

Monday morning started with breakfast in Cafe Iruna and an attack strategy for the day ahead.  Museum of Navarra was closed for the day, another example of my unerring timing when travelling.  Not to be outdone we took ourselves down to the corrals on Calle Santo Domingo where the bulls for San Fermin are kept in readiness for their fate.  Traditionally located outside the city limits the bulls were run through the streets to the Plaza de Toros.  For centuries young men have run with the bulls to prove their manhood to the watching senoritas, and things don't change.  Fuelled by alcohol and testosterone groups of men chant to San Fermin before the bulls are unleashed.  If I was being chased by a few hundred kilos of aggressive bovine flesh I'd certainly want similar inspiration.  Whether fool hardy or brave horrible injuries and deaths among the runners are not unknown.

Camino Santiago

La Curva

The encierro or bull run begins at 8am, and up the slope of Calle Santo Domingo the bulls give chase.  In the mist of the mayhem, in the little square outside the market, is a mark of a more gentle saintly dedication, the Camino Santiago. The route continues up the slope to Plaza del Ayuntamiento and a slight left turn to the short Calle de Mercaderes.  From here the route takes a sharp right known as La Curva, or Dead Man’s Curve on to Calle de la Estafeta.  This is the last stretch of the route and leads directly to the bull ring.  The route in total is about 900m and takes about 3-4 minutes but must feel like an eternity when the bull is closing in.

Ayuntamiento

Memorial

Across from the Ayumtamiento or town hall on Calle de Mercaderes lies a memorial to another less recent violent death and a reminder of the brutality and carnage of an earlier era.  

Our evening finish with a few glasses of wine and some pintxos in the local bars. I liked Pamplona, it's a city sure of itself.  It may not have the beaches of San Sebastian but it has confidence.  If you come here you're welcomed, if you don't, well that's your loss.  Pamplona is a city well worth a visit and I will be back, maybe not for San Fermin but I will be back.

After evening mass had finished, at the time of the paseo, the bar in the Plaza Mayor that usually shows bullfights on television had a smell of hot olive oil from a hatchway into a tiny neon-lit kitchen where a woman with her hair in a cloth was frying a tortilla in a pan and warming tripe in an earthenware dish. From some farm workers in overalls sitting at the bar on high stools near the door came a smell of sour sweat and sharp red wine. From the saucers on the bar where people had been eating tapas and raciones came a smell of broken prawns, garlic and pimenton. From the noisily gargling coffee machine behind the bar came a whiff of new-made strong coffee, with a quite different undertone of fresh ground coffee when the barman topped up the measure to make the next cup, after banging the steaming old grounds into a drawer below the machine. Over everything curled the friendly smell of black tobacco.

The smoke drifted in skeins up around the hanging hams dropping their incipient stalactites of fat into little paper umbrellas stuck in their lowest points to catch it. Cigarette ends nestled among the discarded sugar sachets on the bar floor, joined by the legs and heads of prawns, wooden toothpicks, the skins of from slices of morcilla (an earthy black pudding), olive stones, oil-spotted paper serviettes fresh from fingers and lips busy with squares of tuna, bits of artichoke, meatballs, battered whitebait or little pastry purses of mince meat.

Christopher Howes, A Pilgrim In Spain

Tomorrow is Bayonne in France.  I miss Spain already.