In our Geo Quiz we were looking for the name of the capital city of Navarre, Spain. The city is best known for the San Fermin festival which ends today and was made famous in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The answer is Pamplona, Spain. The World's David Leveille reports on the festival in today's global hit.
The streets are alive in Pamplona today with celebrations and fireworks.
The city's annual fiesta features all night street parties, lots of sangria, bullfights and the quintessential event, los encierros. That's when crowds of competitors race through narrow cobblestone streets while attempting to outrun a half a dozen angry bulls. Each encierro this week has been eventful. On Monday a 32-year-old Spanish man "received a horn jab in the thigh" ...Later in the week, A 55-year-old man had to be taken to hospital. He "suffered multiple contusions".
Earlier today Canadian tourist was badly bruised. 31 year old American Ray Ducharme suffered the worst injury this year...he was thrown by one of the young cows set free in the Pamplona bull ring for people to taunt and dodge. He remains partially paralyzed in very serious condition.
So you have to wonder what motivates someone to run with the bulls? Is it foolhardy or courageous? It's a question that puzzles Nives Mandara. She's tour operator in Pamplona who greets dozens of foreign tourists who seem bent on running:
Why do they want, that's a very good question, and that's what we ask them every day why do you want to run? and they tell us I always wanted to come to Pamplona to run ... and we always try to tell them don't do it, it's not a joke.
It's not a joke to American teenager Matthew Greeley who came to Pamplona with his mother and step father. Greeley was determined to run with the bulls:
"My step-Dad told me you probably shouldn't do it cause its so dangerous and everybody tells you not to do it my mother said not to do it because its so dangerous.
But there was just something about the encierros that lured him.
As soon as I saw the bull run, the first day I didn't run I saw it, I watched it from the terrace, and as soon as you see it, you realize I mean being at the age I am, I'm 18 and it would be something irresponsible to not run with the bulls. I feel like I've come all the way here and I might as well just run with the bulls..like I'm not going to waste my time here.
Thirteen people have been killed during runs since record keeping started in 1924. Greeley says he's aware of that, but the way he calculates it, the chances are about one in a thousand that he'll get gored by a bull.
It's like this: it's kind of like taking any chances. I mean I believe you know you take chances to experience something better than anything, like walking across the street, you can get hit by a car, but it's a just a very small chance. Everybody has the fear but you know you have to know how to do it, I would say I'm pretty good at maneuvering through people and basically the people is even a bigger problem because there's people that are pushing you and running faster and faster away from the bulls. The people that really get gored are the ones that are running directly in front of the bull. I didn't run in front of the bull.like I didn't turn around and there's a bull behind me, I ran along basically I ran alongside in a street where there are no exits, it's one narrow street, I ran alongside the bulls as long as I could, probably, approximately 3 to 4 seconds.
That 3 or 4 seconds when Greeley was so close to the bull was, he says, unlike any other moment he'd ever experienced. He says its was so much fun he'd do it again. On the other hand he says he found it disturbing to watch bulls die at the hands of matadors in the bull rings. California Businessman Jonathan Knowles is attending the Pamplona fiesta for the 5th straight year. He says his fascination goes back to reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. But for Knowles, the question to run or not to run with the bulls is a no-brainer:
It's extremely dangerous, people get hurt every year and people die. It's a very serious thing to run with the bulls. Today someone was gored, someone from New York earlier this week was tossed in the air by one of the brave cows, and is currently a paraplegic in a hospital and so its very dangerous stuff. And I find personally that there is so much more to the Fiesta of San Fermin above and beyond that its simply not worth taking the chance on running with the bulls.
But Knowles says he does enjoy watching the spectacle of the encierro from his apartment that looks out on the action. Still he says all the media focus on los encierros misses the real action. He says the Fiesta is more about the traditional street parties, the street puppets known as gigantes, and the spirited music that's everywhere:
"The people who run of course are very often people who are not from Pamplona, but from all over the world who come, in some countries, it's even a rite of passage. What we don't often have is the opportunity to see is the people pushing their strollers down the street with their babies heading out to Plaza Castillo, the main plaza of the town to participate in the Basque dancing. It's a great big plaza, and hundreds, thousands of locals come together in this plaza and participate in an incredible group dance, around the center of the plaza. What the cameras don't show us, what we don't see in the newspapers are the smiling faces of the people who are participating in the dance with their small children."
The Fiesta of San Fermin concludes today. It will return next year as it has since the 16th century. So come next July people will again travel in droves to Pamplona, some to dance with the devil in the form of a snorting, charging 1300 pound bull, others will come just to dance and be merry.
