Matthew DentonEdmundson is a writer who divides his time among Florida, Idaho, and rural Virginia. He wrote the cover story on wild ginseng for our Autumn 2022 issue.
Before arriving in Pamplona, in the Basque region of northern Spain, I had imagined the San Fermín festival as Ernest Hemingway describes it in The Sun Also Rises—as a picturesque Spanish town's quaint celebration of its annual bullfight. In the novel, Jake Barnes introduces us to tavern keepers, local aficionados, and bullfighters, taking endless pleasure in revealing the intimate details of what was, in the 1920s, a little-known regional tradition. I understood, of course, that in the decades since, the festival has evolved into a wildly popular tourist attraction, but I wasn't quite prepared for what I saw this past summer, when more than a million people from all over the world descended on Pamplona for the fiesta, the running of the bulls, and the corrida (the bullfight). The narrow cobblestone streets were packed. Almost everyone was dressed in the traditional garb of San Fermín festivalgoers: white shirt and red bandana. Moving with the crowd on the third afternoon of the fiesta, I felt like I was inside an unhinged version of Where's Waldo. A marching band plowed its way past me, the tuba player spinning with his unwieldy instrument. The restaurants sold overpriced pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), and the storefronts hawked T-shirts and plush bull toys, some of them stuck with miniature spears. In the Plaza de Toros, somebody had placed a red fedora and a string of Mardi Gras beads on the statue of Hemingway.
When I bought my ticket to the corrida from a round-faced Basque scalper, I had my hesitations. For the first 22 years of my life, I had been a staunch vegetarian. When I was 12, my father (who was not a vegetarian) gave me a copy of Animal Liberation, the seminal work by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, and for a time, the book was my bible. More recently, I've started eating meat occasionally, opting for cuts that are, I make sure to learn, “responsibly raised” by local farmers. I told myself that I was attending the bullfight as a journalist—I'd chosen not to wear the white shirt and red bandana—but I was far from sure I'd be able to stomach sitting in a cheering crowd while a bull was tortured to death.
The corrida began with the matadors and their teams paying their respects to the crowd and the presiding dignitaries. The fighters dressed in colorful traditional costumes, looking a bit like rhinestone cowboys, in their slim-fitting suits that sparkled glamorously in the afternoon sun. The head matador, or torero, was the most extravagantly dressed, his green suit laced with gold. My seat was about halfway down the stands, in the shady half of the arena, where the serious aficionados tend to sit. On the other side, in the unrelenting sun, the peñas—local social clubs—were already going wild, singing, waving flags, sharing wine, and now and then whipping pastries at one another.
Without more fanfare, the first bull charged out through a trap door. He was much larger and stronger than any bull you've seen in a roadside pasture. I had expected him to behave aggressively from the moment of his
