The Garden of Learning

Geography

Which country hosts the running of the bulls in Pamplona?

  • Spain
  • Portugal
  • Mexico

The answer is Spain. Every July.

Spain, during the festival of San Fermin each July - eight days in which six bulls are run through 875 metres of closed streets to the bullring each morning. The run itself takes two to three minutes. Fifteen people have been killed since records began in 1910, and dozens are injured every year, mostly by falling rather than by bulls.

It was not invented as a spectacle. Bulls had to be moved from the fields outside town to the ring, and young men began running ahead of them to show off; the tradition is a piece of livestock logistics that acquired an audience. It became internationally famous almost entirely because Hemingway put it in The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and the town has been dealing with the consequences ever since.

The animals are killed in the ring that afternoon, which is the part that the tourist version tends to leave out and the reason the event is contested inside Spain as much as outside it. Bullfighting has been banned in the Canary Islands since 1991 and was banned in Catalonia in 2010 before that was overturned by Spain's constitutional court, and polling consistently shows most Spaniards have no interest in it.