RUNNING WITH
THE BULLS OF PAMPLONA - page 4
| Inside
the ring men threw themselves
over the wooden barriers
of into the stands, men tore at
one another to find safety. The
brave and drunk men challenged
the bulls in the posture of
matadors. A British kid was on his
knees, vomiting from concussion
and exhaustion, until a pair of
Spaniards – in rugged mercy
– threw him six feet over
the barricades into the stands. |
 |
 |
A second rocket sounded,
signifying that all the bulls had
entered the passages beneath the
stadium. A great cheer rose up
from the thousands of spectators.The
entire run lasted two minutes and
nine seconds. |
It was a day
when a twenty two year old kid from the
province of Navarranamed Juan
Villabalbona had been gored seven times
by three different bulls. He lay close to
death in the hospital. Several older men,
running in the passage of Santo Domingo,
had been critically injured. There
were no deaths. There has not been a
death since 1995, when an
American tourist from Illinois received a
fatal horn wound beginning in his back
and tunnelling through to the middle of
his stomach. He was drunk and uninformed.
I made the Pamplona newspapers that day:
just a cameo shot while running – my
hands out, my head over my shoulder -- in
the lower right hand corner of a full
page photograph.
| True, young men are made of
an ego, pride, machismo, and
irrelevant body parts. But this
alone does not justify running
with bulls through the
cobblestone streets of Pamplona.
It is a case study in the type of
human behaviour that lacks
moderation and reason. But 2004
was the 800-something-th Annual
Running of the Bulls. This
madness, it seems to continue. |
 |
One does not
go to Pamplona to not run
with the bulls. You may go under
the pretext that you might run, or
that you definitely will not run.
However, we are no different than the
butcher boys of the first Encierro. If
you go to Pamplona, you will run with the
bulls in the red of morning across the
ancient cobbled streets, beneath the
balconies of children and grandparents
and journalists and tourists, through the
great arch of the stadium across the
orange dirt of the bull ring; and in the
end, you'll get hurt. If there is no
bull-horn-sized tunnel from your back to
your stomach, you'll at least have a
bloody mark. One hopes for such glorious
souvenirs. How they compare to key-chains
and mugs.
And when the last
bull has been herded into the stocks
beneath the stadium, your life, in its
ordinary invisibility and abstraction,
will suddenly reveal itself with a
material freshness, with a texture,
and a flavour, and a value. And
you will swear to yourself that never,
ever, again will you run with the bulls
through the cobblestone streets of
Pamplona
Book
your own Pamplona Adventure!
Working with excellent local
contacts in Pamplona, Madrid
& Beyond designs special
San Fermín programmes to open up
some of the best-kept secrets of
this unique festival. Madrid
& Beyond can also arrange
tickets for the bullfights and V.I.P.
balconies for the Txupinazo
(the riotous opening ceremony)
and the famous Running of
the Bulls. To witness the
world's most famous fiesta, book
well in advance!
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