The festival in honour of San Fermín celebrated in Pamplona -los Sanfermines- is a mixture of the official and the popular, the religious and the profane, for local people and outsiders, the old and the new, order and chaos. And all of this packed into one long week starting with a bang at midday on the sixth of July and ending with the nostalgia tinged with expectation at midnight on the fourteenth.
The Sanfermines have always been a special festival but when Pamplona was sffll a smau unknown city -provincial and clerical- the Sanf ermines found their most fervent supporter in the American writer Hemingway.
The Sanfermines offer the visitor an open and hospitable festival where anything out of the ordinary is welcomed and soon becomes part of the tradition, so long as ¡t shows the respect due to others. The Sanfermines is a fiesta where no one is an outsider, everyone is equal and in which the festive spirit is never broken, centred around the people of Pamplona in the widest sense: all the people who are in the city during the always too short 204 hours of revelry, dancing, prayers and bacchanalian extravagance.
It shouldn't be forgotten that the Sanfermines is a festival of religious origins and that this aspect is still relived in huge demonstrations such as the Procession on the morning of the seventh. But the religious celebration is in perfect harmony with the cult of the bull -a symbolic animal- and with the cult of Bacchus, the god of wine -a drink which ¡s no less symbolic. The Sanfermines are, in short, a total, absolute and radical festival in which the people of Pamplona play the leading part, but in which outsiders feel immediately at home -there's no question of being a mere onlooker- as for nine days Pamplona becomes the world capital of happiness.
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