The thrill of the Pamplona bull run

The first time my friend Rob and I experienced Pamplona’s San Fermin festival was in 2017. Held every year from 6-14 July in the northern Spanish city, it’s most famous for its bull runs, or encierros: at 8 a.m., on eight consecutive mornings, the six bulls destined for that evening’s bullfight, as well as six docile oxen to guide them, run for almost a kilometre through Pamplona’s oldest quarters, accompanied by thousands of thrill-seeking human participants known as mozos. 

Rob and I have now run with the bulls of Pamplona four times – once that first year, once in 2018 and twice at last year’s festival (it was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 because of Covid). Next week we’ll be meeting in Pamplona again, to run our fifth and sixth encierros. If our girlfriends ever join us for San Fermin, which so far they haven’t, their reaction to how much we discuss our runs – tactics beforehand, minute analysis afterwards, starting at 8.05