Women fear men more than bulls 50 years after joining Pamplona

Times

6 days ago

It was a July morning in 1975 when a thunder of hooves echoed through Pamplona's old town. Tonnes of muscle and horn came charging around the 90-degree bend towards Estafeta Street, a long and narrow stretch offering nowhere to hide, save for a few doorways.
Mariví Mendiburu waited nervously. The 21-year-old had ducked under barricades and stepped on to the cobbled streets of the city's annual bull run route. As people's jogs turned to sprints, one man in the sea of red neckerchiefed runners pointed and protested: 'Hey! A woman!'
The ban on women participating in the encierro — the running of the bulls — had been lifted in 1974, but any who tried that year were pushed back behind the barriers.
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A year later, the dictator Francisco Franco had months to live and one did not need to have an ear to the ground to hear the rumble of change in Spain. 'It was an era of demonstrations, of strikes, of fight,' Mendiburu said. 'There was an atmosphere that things weren't going to be the same.'
Unlike her brother, who did bull runs out of an insatiable passion — he did not stop despite having been gored in the chest four times — the young feminist's motivation was purely political. 'The encierro was full of machismo. It was simply to make a statement. To say, 'Oi. We can run too.' '
When Mendiburu and her friend Alicia Rivas ran that year, they waited for the bulls, shielded by a ring of men so that they could not be pulled out of the street. 'If we had gone alone, we definitely wouldn't have managed it,' she said.
Fifty years after their pioneering run, spotting a woman in the encierro is still like finding a needle in a haystack. Female runners account for only 6 per cent of the roughly 3,000 that brave the frantic dash on each of the eight mornings of the San Fermín festival, but for them, the front line in the fight for change has shifted from the bull run to the other side of the barricades.
During the 2016 celebrations an 18-year-old woman was found on a bench having been gang-raped by five men who called themselves the 'Wolf Pack'. It became a watershed moment for Spanish legislation and placed the festival at the heart of the national debate about sexual violence.
It was not, however, the only case of gender-based violence to mar the image of the festival and the thronging crowds and parties that engulf it. In 2008 Nagore Laffage, 20, refused to have sex with a man during the fiesta. He beat her to death.
The cases are not isolated, Teresa Sáez Barrao, an activist and ex-parliamentarian, said. 'We had been talking about this problem for years but the institutions would say that it didn't happen during Sanfermines [San Fermín festival].'
Now widely acknowledged, many locals lament Pamplona's reputation. 'It's a shame because San Fermín is so much more than that,' said Sara Puñal, who grew up watching the encierro from her grandparents' balcony on Estafeta Street and debuted last year. 'But the people are scarier than the bulls.'
Scores of safety initiatives have been implemented in Pamplona: there is an app for reporting attacks; the council has funded improved lighting and surveillance in the city centre; women's groups hold self-defence workshops; partygoers getting night buses can demand a stop anywhere to shorten their walk home; and, as of 2024, bars are plastered with guides on the official protocols to follow in the event of an assault. Information points around town campaign for a 'Pamplona free of sexist assaults'.
'It's true that security has noticeably increased,' Saioa Sagasti, another local runner, said. 'There are more police and that makes you feel safer.'
It is questionable, however, whether much has changed. A report by the municipal police after last year's fiesta said that arrests were made for 24 sexual assaults, six of which were classed as 'high intensity': the same category as the Wolf Pack case.
Pamplona, capital of Navarre, swells fivefold during the San Fermín festival. 'There's a general idea that from the 6th to the 14th of July in Pamplona there aren't any rules and anything goes,' Sagasti said, echoing the Gen-Z runner Fushan Equiza González's claim that visitors treat it like a 'lawless city'.
In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway gave a vivid account of the festivities: 'The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up … Everything became quite unreal and finally it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.' Almost a century on, Sagasti said, 'You're more alert and take more care than you would on a normal night.'
The encierro evolved over centuries from the practical task of herding bulls towards the bullring into a magnet for thrill-seekers. The three minutes it takes for the six bulls to cover 875 metres are watched live by millions of viewers across Spain, complete with commentary and slow-motion replays. Sixteen men have died since records on the practice began.
'You go into survival mode,' Equiza González said. 'I'm quite small, so for the men, tripping over me is like tripping over a Coca-Cola can.' She doesn't let that quash her enthusiasm. 'You feel like you're part of the history and identity of where you come from — living the city's tradition from the inside. It's very important to people.'
For the small percentage of women that participate, there is a perverse sense of equality inside the streets of the run compared with beyond it. 'They really value me and I don't notice any unfavourable treatment or gender differences,' Puñal said. 'At all times I've just felt like one of the rest.'
'In the encierro the reality is that we're all exposed to the same risk,' Equiza González said.