Pamplona: The city Hemingway never really left

A century after Ernest Hemingway immortalised Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises, the Spanish city continues to draw visitors through its literary legacy, historic cafes and iconic San Fermín festival

There are cities we visit, but only a few enter our lives. Pamplona in northeastern Spain was that kind of city for Ernest Hemingway. Writers often describe a place. Hemingway, however, made Pamplona part of his own legend. Even long after he left its streets, cafés, and bullfighting rings, the city remained inside his imagination — throughout his life and legacy. And even today, Pamplona is integrated with his presence. 

The moment I entered Café Iruña, on the Plaza del Castillo, I felt that connection. It was the strange feeling of following the footsteps of one of the most powerful writers of the twentieth century whose life and literature became almost inseparable from this place. Hemingway, then a 24-year-old reporter for the Toronto Star, first came to Pamplona from Paris in 1923, accompanied by his then-wife, Hadley Richardson. He returned there repeatedly between 1923 and 1927, each time during the iconic San Fermín festival. In Pamplona, Hemingway discovered a combination of lifestyles — bullfighting, wine, women, fishing, coffee, music, noise, physical courage, and the full Spanish appetite for life — that seemed almost designed for him.

Pamplona then was just an ordinary Spanish town, blended with its history and traditions. Its name came from the Roman general Pompey, who set up a camp there during 75-74 BC, in the war against Sertorius. For Hemingway, however, life seemed to be lived intensely, almost dangerously in Pamplona. 

He used to sit at Café Iruña there for hours, drinking, talking, watching people, and absorbing the surroundings. A century later, the café is still trying to maintain that character. Hemingway gave the café, and, of course, the city, a kind of immortality through his masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises. It was his first novel, written in 1925 during his third visit to Pamplona, and was published the following year, exactly a century ago. Its working title was Fiesta, a Spanish word for festival. The story describes his personal experience through the lens of a group of American and British expatriates from Paris to Pamplona. Many characters therein carried the imprint of people Hemingway knew. Pamplona served as a living thread throughout the story, possibly even as an important character in its own right. 

The San Fermín festival was central to it. The famous bull run is only one part of the festival. There was dancing, drinking, music, crowds, and an overwhelming sense of collective exhilaration throughout seven days and seven nights. Personally, Hemingway was fascinated by courage and death too, and the festival brought both of them into his close proximity. His passionate writing helped carry the fame of San Fermín beyond Spain. Indian audiences have seen it through the 2011 Bollywood movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. 

Yet Hemingway’s relationship with Pamplona was not a simple love story. He returned there for the ninth and the last time in 1959, when he was already a Nobel Prize-winning writer. However, it was no longer the city he romanced in his youth. In 1959, Spain was under Franco, and even Hemingway’s books were banned there. Hemingway was changed, too. There were fame, war, love, literature, awards, disappointment, and the passing of youth in between. The spectacle he had loved once seemed, to him, transformed to something monstrous. Two years later, in 1961, when Hemingway died by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, that was around the timing of San Fermín. 

Driving to Pamplona from Bilbao, another town in northern Spain, I was trying to imagine the distant view that Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s alter ego in the novel, described in The Sun Also Rises: the city rising from the plain, its walls, its brown cathedral, and its broken skyline. A century later, the crowds may be larger, but the old spell survives. Perhaps that’s the real chemistry between Hemingway and Pamplona. The city gave the young writer a language of life — wild, physical, noisy, and dangerous. In return, he transformed Pamplona into a sort of pilgrimage place. In 1923, there were roughly 20 visitors in Pamplona. In 1959, Hemingway was astonished to see a crowd of 40,000. Today, there are roughly 1.5 million visitors every year during the festival. It was mostly through Hemingway, who transformed his experience into his best novel, which is often regarded as a defining work of the 20th century. It was certainly an early modernist novel. 

Their relationship somehow endured. Today, Hemingway is everywhere in Pamplona. There are his statues, the room he used to stay in at the Gran Hotel La Perla, the cafés he used to spend hours in, and his bullfighting memories. The city still draws immense economic and cultural value from a romance Hemingway helped create. But it has changed too, as cities do. And while Hemingway spent his life romancing with Pamplona, the city, perhaps, used his legacy and moved beyond him. Perhaps Hemingway understood that on his last trip there.

The writer is professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. 

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