San Fermín draws a million people to watch something 77% of Spain wants to stop

Two emergency healthcare workers climbed to the balcony of Pamplona’s city hall and fired the rocket that opens San Fermín. Below, in temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius — Navarra was under an orange meteorological alert — thousands of people in white linen and red neck-scarves roared as if nothing about this was surprising. Which it wasn’t. Which is part of the problem.

Clint Jean Louis Fernández, an emergency physician, and Araceli Sergio Aguilera, a nurse from Tafalla’s mobile ICU, had been selected by public vote to light the Chupinazo this year, in tribute to healthcare professionals. By the time they lit the fuse, Navarra’s regional health services had recorded 83 heat-related cases in the opening days of July — triple the count from the same period last year. Fernández described the moment as “heat, emotion, sweat, but magical and unforgettable.” He had just initiated the emergency his colleagues would spend nine days managing.

San Fermín is one of the world’s most attended traditional festivals: nine days, 204 hours, 516 programmed events, a city of 200,000 hosting more than a million visitors. It is also, in the summer of 2026, one of the most contested. Three pressures are converging simultaneously — a heat crisis making the ritual physically dangerous, a generational shift in Spanish public opinion leaving 77 percent of the population opposed to the bullfighting at the festival’s ceremonial center, and a commercial and legal dispute that is quietly separating the encierro, the running of the bulls, from the corrida, the afternoon kill in the ring. Each of these tensions has been building for years. What distinguishes 2026 is that all three have arrived together.

Recommended ReadingThis World Cup won’t reward dazzle — it’ll reward whoever survives the month

This year also marks the centennial of The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway published his novel — Fiesta in Spanish — in October 1926, a year after the July in Pamplona he was describing. He had first attended the festival in 1923 as a 24-year-old correspondent for the Toronto Star, and returned eight more times over the following decades. By the time the novel made Pamplona legible to the English-speaking world, the terms of that transformation were already fixed. Americans became, and remain, the single largest national group of foreign runners in the encierro, according to Pamplona city officials.

Hemingway’s view of what he created darkened. In The Dangerous Summer, written in 1959, he found the city as he remembered it “except forty thousand tourists have been added,” and framed the observation as loss. In 2026 his arithmetic looks like nostalgia for a manageable problem. Multiple American outlets published Hemingway centennial features on the festival’s opening day, generating a specific wave of literary pilgrims into a city already operating at capacity. What Hemingway created was a mechanism for producing new reasons to come to Pamplona; what he could not have foreseen was a mechanism for stopping.

The economic case for San Fermín is unambiguous. A study commissioned by Pamplona city hall and conducted in 2025, based on 2,727 street surveys, calculated the festival’s total economic impact at €259.4 million: 424,369 unique visitors, 2,431 equivalent full-time jobs, €52.2 million in government tax revenue. International visitors spent an average of €460 each; visitors from outside France averaged €708.80. The festival’s satisfaction rating was 8.9 out of 10.

The environmental case is less clean. The same study found CO₂ emissions of 11,847 tonnes — an increase of 28.4 percent over the previous year, driven 85 percent by external transport. The city is developing an Intelligent Destination Platform to manage real-time visitor flows. It also operated under an orange meteorological alert on opening day, distributed hydration advisories, and placed six large screens across the city’s plazas to reduce crowding in the hottest central zones. Authorities noted that alcohol — constitutive to the festival’s social fabric — accelerates dehydration.

The first encierro ran on the morning of July 7. Eight bulls from the Fuente Ymbro ranch — the heaviest weighing 610 kilograms — completed the 875-metre route in 2 minutes and 16 seconds. Four people required medical attention; three were transported to hospital with contusions. No gorings. Approximately 300 people are treated for injuries on an average festival day, according to The Olive Press; fifteen people have been killed by bulls in the last century of running. The last fatality in the encierro was in 2009.

The safety record is part of what makes the debate about San Fermín resistant to resolution by data alone. The people who run take an informed physical risk and overwhelmingly survive it. The animals do not. Each bull that runs in the morning is killed in the ring that afternoon.

On this point, the festival’s internal politics have produced their most structurally significant rupture. Mayor Joseba Asirón’s Bildu-aligned municipal government has held Pamplona’s city hall since 2015. At the Chupinazo he declared that “there are no spectators in San Fermín.” His administration’s actual position on the corrida has been expressed through a more durable means: a rights agreement with RTVE, Spain’s public broadcaster, giving TVE exclusive image and transmission rights for the encierros at €650,000 per year. The deal was criticized sharply by the bullfighting sector and the RUCTL, the runners’ union, as the specialist publication Mundotoro reported. TVE has not aired bullfighting for years and is associated with positions sympathetic to abolition. Critics argue Asirón has not banned the corrida — he has handed its most commercially valuable element to a broadcaster philosophically opposed to everything that follows the run.

This political maneuver is deliberate and almost invisible. It separates the encierro as civic spectacle from the corrida as cultural practice without formally declaring that separation. Whether it represents pragmatic modernization or institutional abolition by commercial proxy depends almost entirely on which side of the debate you arrive from.

The public opinion context gives some indication of the pressure behind that debate. A 2025 study by the BBVA Foundation found that 77 percent of Spaniards want an end to bullfighting, with an average approval rating of 1.8 out of 10 — down from 2.7 in 2008, and falling most steeply among people under 35. AnimaNaturalis and PETA staged a theatrical protest in Pamplona on the eve of the Chupinazo; a march organized by Iruñea Antitaurina called for a San Fermín without corridas on the morning of the first encierro.

The steel-man for maintaining the tradition is not weak. Bullfighting retains legal status as cultural heritage under Spanish law. The Pamplona ring is operated by the Casa de Misericordia, a charitable institution whose revenues fund social programs in the city. The animals bred for the corrida, defenders argue, live in conditions that commercial livestock rarely approach — pasture-reared for five or six years before their single fight. The cultural sovereignty argument holds that suppressing a tradition because a national majority currently opposes it is qualitatively indistinguishable from other forms of cultural erasure, and that living traditions do not survive referenda.

The counter is that the traditions which endure are not the ones that resist all change. San Fermín has already adapted substantially: feminist safety protocols were introduced following the 2016 La Manada gang rape that originated at the festival; heat-management technology is being piloted; broadcast rights have been restructured. The question being tested in 2026 is whether those adaptations are sufficient for a ritual simultaneously drawing record opposition, running in record heat, and celebrating the centennial of the book that sent the world to Pamplona in the first place.

What is known: San Fermín 2026 opened under the most extreme early July heat Navarra has recorded, with 83 heat-related medical cases in the region in the opening days of July — triple the prior year’s count. The festival generated a total economic impact of €259.4 million in 2025, drawing 424,369 unique visitors. The first encierro of 2026 produced four injuries and no gorings. A 2025 BBVA Foundation study found 77 percent of Spaniards want bullfighting ended. The centennial of The Sun Also Rises is bringing a specific wave of American literary tourism to Pamplona in 2026. Pamplona city hall signed an exclusive RTVE rights deal for encierro footage worth €650,000 per year, drawing protests from the bullfighting sector and runners’ union.

What is disputed: Whether the encierro and the corrida are separable traditions or one indivisible practice. Whether the RTVE deal represents modernization or de facto abolition by commercial means. Whether a traditional festival can adapt to a climate that requires medical advisories for participants wearing its ritual costume. Whether the 77 percent opposition figure translates into political pressure sufficient to change a festival that draws a million visitors and an 8.9/10 satisfaction rating. Whether Hemingway’s creation of a global audience for San Fermín was a gift to the festival or a long fuse he did not know he was lighting.

The Chupinazo fires at noon every July 6. The bulls run at 8 a.m. The ring fills at 6:30 p.m. Pamplona is running a 700-year-old ritual through the sensors and screens of a city that has begun, quietly, to measure whether it can still afford to.

More Like This

Mexico 86 on Netflix: how Mexico hosted a World Cup nobody else wanted, and who cashed in

World Cup 2026’s most dangerous opponent isn’t on any team sheet — it’s the heat

‘Flamin’ Hot’ (2023), The Story of Spicy Cheetos. Movie Review

World Cup 2026: the model, the experts and the market disagree on everything but Spain and France

Netflix Ignites Screens with ‘Too Hot to Handle: Spain’: Sun, Singles, and a Surprising Intimacy Ban as Paradise Gets a Pricey Twist

World Cup 2026: Cape Verde open against Spain, and getting here was the achievement