Iberian Traveler blog

The newest member of the peña arrived on Monday 27 April, Olivia Marie Mosier. Congratulations to Richard and Marie, who met in Pamplona during Sanfermín 2003. While we lost a guide we gained a great family in exchange. Olivia Marie and family will be joining us for her first fiesta this July, but it may be a few years before she is ready to run with the bulls…


¡Viva San Fermin! Gora Sanfermín!

THE OPENING CEREMONY – 6 JULY
Join Peña Seattle in the Ayuntamiento at noon on July 6th for the opening ceremony of Los Sanfermines, and the “txupinazo” (Basque), the firing of the rockets announcing the start of Fiesta de San Fermín 2009. Enjoy this unique spectacle from the privileged vantage point of a private balcony overlooking the Town Hall Square as it begins to fill with thousands of celebrants, all dressed in white.

Our special opening ceremony program includes the services of a local guide who will explain the significance of the event, premium balcony reservations in the Town Hall Square, across from city hall, refreshments, including Cava (Spanish champagne), excellent Navarran wine, cold beer and soda and an assortment of fresh appetizers while we await the firing of the rockets, at noon, signaling the start of another great fiesta.

The “txupinazo” sets the mood for the next eight days and nights, 204 hours of the fiesta, as Pamplona celebrates its long and colorful history.


€375 EUR/person – (space is limited)

Celebration Lunch – 6 July – Join us for our special celebration lunch following the opening ceremony.

€95 EUR/person. This special celebration lunch is limited to a maximum of 20.

BALCONY PROGRAMS – 7 TO 14 JULY
Encierro, the “running of the bulls”

VIP Balcony Program - Program includes our special buffet breakfast at the Nuevo Casino in the Plaza del Castillo following the encierro. The VIP program is limited to a maximum of 35 people per day and is available to VIP hotel package clients only.
Additional VIP balcony reservations can be added for €135 EUR/person per day

Standard Balcony Program - Includes the balcony reservation and services of a guide for the encierro.
€95 EUR/person per day for our hotel package clients. Private transfer included.
€115 EUR/person per day for non-hotel clients. Private transfer, from selected hotels, can be added for €10 EUR/person.
Add breakfast at the Hotel Maisonnave to the Standard Balcony Program for €30 EUR/person.

Pobre de mi Balcony Program – 14 July (10:00 pm to 1:00 am)
€ 90 EUR/person Program is limited to a maximum of 20 people.

BULLFIGHT TICKETS – 6 TO 14 JULY
Bullfight tickets are available to our hotel clients only! Please contact us for price and availability

SPECIAL EXCURSIONS DURING THE FIESTA
City Tour - 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 & 13 July – A visit to the casco viejo, the Old City.
€35 EUR/person. Program is limited to a maximum of 20 people/day – advanced reservations required

Bodega Tour - A visit to the Bodega Otazu or the Señorio de Sarría, two of the premium wineries in Navarra. Tour is followed by a special lunch. Available 8 and 10 July – or by special arrangement.
€185 EUR/person. Program is limited to a maximum of 20 people/day – advanced reservations required.

ADDITIONAL TOURS
Tours are available before, during and following the fiesta (not available on 6, 7 or 12 July 2009)
• A day in Orreaga / Roncesvalles
• A visit to the Irati Forest
• A tour of the beautiful Baztan Valley
Please contact us regarding these special excursions, which are limited to a maximum of 20 people.

TRANSFERS AND GUIDE SERVICES
Transfers – Airport to Hotel
• Hondarribia (San Sebastián) – Barcelona – Biarritz – Bilbao – Madrid – Noain (Pamplona) – Please contact us regarding price and availability.

Guides in Pamplona during the Fiesta
• 4 hours - €400 EUR for up to 8 people
• 8 Hours - €600 EUR for up to 8 people
• €125 EUR for each additional hour

LANGUAGES
Our guides speak Spanish, French, English, Italian, German and Basque

During our recent tip to Navarra we were invited by the Tourist Office of Spain, VLC Valencia Tourism and the Comunitat Valenciana to be their guests during this year's Las Fallas celebration. It was something totally new for me and quite different than our last visit to Valencia for New Years, when the fireworks are set off in the middle of the day.

Fallas is similar in many ways to the Fiesta de San Fermín, full of energy and late nights, and of course the fireworks, but it has its own style with the final night being the most intense and interesting, especially when we were able to be ringside for the Moors & Christians Parade in the Falla Almirante Cadarso.

After four days of celebrating we needed some rest, a few quiet days in the Rioja before finishing up our original trip to Navarra.

You can view the rest of the images from Las Fallas 2009 at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37104129@N07/sets/

Since 1591 the annual Fiesta of San Fermin has been all about running with the bulls but these days bulls and tourists alike need guides to navigate that “party on the run.”
Even hundreds of wannabe runners find themselves bumped off the route to the bullring before the starting rockets are fired because they fail to learn that police clear the same certain sections at the last minute each morning.

“The Sun Also Rises” elevated San Fermín’s encierro to an international hot spot but Ernest Hemingway himself advised 81 years ago to seek a spot to watch the run by 5:30 a.m. These days only laggards wait so long to begin getting into place.

“It’s bulls before breakfast every day,” said Philip Ross, who first ran here himself in 1972, joining Navy buddy Wayne Batchelor who was already a Pamplona veteran. They slept in parks then. Now Ross and his wife Rogene tailor pricey individualized packages for American clients and stay in fine hotels, thank you very much.

Each morning from July 7-14 Ross gets clients close enough to smell the tension if not the bulls, and to join the crowd at 7:57 a.m. in singing the emotional prayer to Saint Fermin for protection. At 8 a.m. a final rocket launches the half-mile dash to Plaza de Toros where the bulls will fight to certain death in the afternoon.

This daily street theater is the centerpiece of the fiesta even though the runs that have become such tourist-magnets last an average of just under four minutes, a bit longer when bulls lose their way and spread havoc.

Whether visitors run or watch, San Fermin is not for those who are faint of heart or faint of wallet. Perhaps a million people in all during fiesta time – all clad in white with red scarves and sashes -- watch daring young men and women dodge the horns and thrashing hooves of 1300-pound fighting bulls, and relive traditions honoring the saint who is said to have been tied to a bull and dragged to a martyr’s death in A.D. 303.

Bulls in Pamplona always have had shepherds -- and a few tame steers -- to help them follow their one-way road to the bullring. Now humans need shepherds as well, and they find them via the Internet. One such pastore is Philip Ross whose Iberian Traveler firm is based in Seattle, WA and Springfield, Mo. (www.iberiantraveler.com). Ross counts about 25 percent of his clients from Florida, including former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack III whom Spanish reporters made a star during the 2006 party. Ross’s 68 package-clients this year were mostly repeat guests including my wife Mary and I and Wayne and Barbara Batchelor. “When I was young enough to run, they didn’t allow women,” said Barbara Batchelor, who met Wayne here 35 years ago at the famed El Txoko [cq] Bar. Romance must be in the air here. In 2000 Phil Ross met Rogene Laserna on the way home from Pamplona; they married in the Basque country this June.

Why are so many so eager to risk all? “The frontal lobe hadn’t quite developed,” Barbara Batchelor scoffed. Wayne said, “It was just the thing to do. It’s sort of exciting to get caught up in the idea of getting killed or gored, which you didn’t, of course.”

Not often. Bulls killed 14 runners since the city began counting in 1924. Other runners agree that remaining unscathed after bulls storm past is a rush that heightens feelings of being alive. Papa Hemingway first encountered Pamplona in 1923 when it had but 30,000 residents. Although he visited eight more times, he could not have expected the 21st Century scene his legendary tale produces. Now swarms of fiesta-goers willing to sleep in faraway hotels or city parks -- if they sleep at all – swell a modern city that itself is seven times larger than Hemingway knew. “To me it’s the most orderly mass of drunks I’ve ever encountered,” Mrs. Batchelor said.

San Fermin is far more than “the running of the bulls.” Religious and cultural traditions date to the 1196 observance marking the return of Fermin’s remains to his native Pamplona some 900 years after martyrdom in France.

The opening day procession of religious and political figures with a large statue of the saint through downtown follows the Chupinazo ceremony in town hall square. There are daily “Gigante” parades of dancers wearing huge colorful papier-mâché costumed heads, professional concerts staged in Plaza del Castillo, all-night drinking parties, and endless gatherings of street bands or marching peñas that are matador fan clubs on their way to or from the bullring. Amateur bullfights follow the run and cheap daytime shows at the bullring also are open.

As tough as Pamplona is for the bulls, it’s not always a lark for people either and Red Cross ambulances stand by most of the barrier’s 40 gates. Several hundred persons are treated each year at the runs, 3 percent of them grievously injured, city officials say. The city’s fatality list was begun only with the 1924 death of Esteban Domeno, 22, from nearby Sanguesa, whose death Hemingway chronicled in “The Sun Also Rises.” The novel quotes a waiter at Iruna Cafe commenting: “Muerto! Dead! With a horn through him. All for morning fun.” The last runner to die was a namesake of the saint, Pamplona resident Fermin Etxeberri, 63, killed in 2003. Twelve years have passed since a fatal goring [note: American Matthew P. Tasio, 22] but this year came close when a vengeful bull named Universal wrote himself into San Fermin’s history book on July 12 by goring seven persons. Universal punctuated that feat by spearing two Ohio brothers simultaneously. The reluctant bull met his own end 11 hours later at the hands of matador Alejandro Taravante, but he dominated that fight as well, knocking a picador and his horse flat to the ground, and heaping public scorn on a bullfighter who in April was carried on the crowd’s shoulders from the Seville bullring. “It could have been an important bull,” the Spanish newspaper “ABC” said in an article deriding the moment of truth.

But it is the morning ritual run, not the afternoon bullfight, that remains the hallmark of an event whose current form is little changed since 1591 when Pamplona shifted the saint’s day and bullfight festival from October to July for better weather.

Barriers first defined the encierro route in 1776, and were doubled after runaway bulls panicked the crowd in 1939. In 1856 the encierro route was realigned to where it is today, when about half its length was moved to the narrow and gritty Estafeta Street. In 1867, city officials despaired of banning the increasingly dangerous festival and chose instead to regulate it. They do that with a zeal that leads nearly all Pamplona residents not directly involved to take vacation. City workers constantly clean parks and streets around the clock to keep bottles and other debris from underfoot, or under sleeping bag. Police do much the same for those who revel too long. Squads of police reinforced from all of Spain are largely tolerant, but insure that runners are sober, over 18, and not carrying items that endanger others. This year a local man was fined and lost visitation rights for taking his 10-year-old son to run before the horns. Taunting or touching a bull during the run also is a no-no that will earn a wrongdoer vigorous smacks from a shepherd’s cane. Advance arrangements by brokers well-connected with local tourism companies assure that those who come so far to see will not be shut out of the action. They deliver hotel rooms, transportation, bullring tickets, balcony vantage 10 feet above the drama, plus wine and food excursions through Basque country during or after fiesta.

Mikel Ollo and Nieves Mantero, partners in Ross’s local link at Erreka Tourist Services, say their firm handles some business from other brokers and travel agents. “They come and go. They are not so special. Phil is special. He is very attentive,” Ollo told us. The relationship is so close that when Phil and Rogene married June 30 in a medieval church here Ollo was best man and Mantero was maid of honor. Ross truly is “attentive,” even offering free advice to non-customers who contact his website or catch up to him in Pamplona.

“They’ll come back to me, as others have, when it’s time to become a client,” says Ross who marks his real success from 2002, after partnering with Rogene.

The competition for accommodations is easy to grasp: 200,000 visitors a day for eight days make 2,200 hotel rooms virtually unattainable. Some visitors become day-trippers from Basque-region paradores, or cities like Lagrono, 61 miles by country road, and Biarritz, France, 82 highway miles. Some tour-packagers bus the revelers in and out of the city from hotels in the Pyrenees foothills 50 miles away. Iberian Traveler charged about $4,500 this year for a typical four-night package for two including “standard” hotels within walking distance, encierro balcony, local guides and necessary hand-holding, plus that breakfast with the typical deep-fried churros and hot chocolate after bulls do their thing.

Perhaps Ross’s most memorable service was arranging delightfully casual lunches that require a full afternoon in restaurants where reservations are virtually impossible without local help. Dinner after the bullfight is easier because Spaniards dine towards midnight, often too late for jet-lagged visitors. International travel is arranged independently, generally by flight to Pamplona via Madrid or Barcelona, or by train from Madrid or Paris. Bullfight tickets average $450 per seat per day. The Plaza de Toros, with Hemingway’s bust out front, seats 19,529 for each of eight corridas. Virtually every seat has been subscribed for years by local residents who pay an average $100 per seat and resell through cartels or syndicates that up the toll four or five times as much – “my ticket Mafia,” Ross calls it. Prices are particularly high on the shady side. The 1844-vintage bullring is owned by the “Casa de Misericordia” (House of Mercy) which says it devotes it profits from subscribers to provide housing for the elderly. PETA, the animal rights group, repeatedly calls on the House of Mercy often to “extend its mercy to all beings” and stop bullfights. On July 5 this year some 1,500 scantily-clad PETA demonstrators drew crowds with their “Running of the Nudes” to publicize its opposition.

By October Iberian Traveler already is selling packages for next year. “We always sell out everything for July 7th and 8th, usually by the middle of March, and decided two years ago to set aside balconies on these dates solely for our hotel-package clients,” Ross said. This year he filled 40 waiting-list orders for leftover balcony spots and bullfight tickets but, from now on, tickets are available only to those who purchase hotel packages. “Everyone else can deal with the scalpers, or their own hotel,” he says.

PDF Version
http://www.prlog.org/10186010-pamplona-and-the-fiesta-de-san-fermn-by-frank-murray.pdf

Located only a few kilometers away from the Pago de Cirsus, with a view of Tudela from the north and Bardenas Reales to the east, the strikingly avant-garde 4-star Hotel Aire de Bardenas takes a totally different approach to providing solitude. One of the select group of distinctive rural hotels belonging to the Nobles del Reino and Rusticae groups, it features only 22 secluded rooms offering guests the opportunity for complete relaxation and contemplation, a chance to be in unity with nature. And the hotel is set amidst the fields of La Ribera that provide Navarra with its abundant harvest of fresh produce.

As described in Wallpaper magazine, the Bardenas Reales “looks like the surface of the moon, and Barcelona architects Emiliano López and Mónica Rivera’s Hotel Aire de Bardenas like a lunar colony. Named after the wind that rolls in over the Bardenas desert, the hotel is a cluster of eight pale boxes around a main hall. They sit a little eerily, like the relic from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the middle of a wheat field.”

This unique construction was the young architects’ first hotel project, and they found innovative ways to assemble very simple, completely recyclable materials to create a hotel that blurs seamlessly with its surroundings rather than simply to overlook the vast, open space. Each “cube” holds one or two rooms with ten others in the central building. All are built from prefab panels, and reused produce crates from local farms serve as a boundary walls and windbreakers. Those rooms in the central building not directly facing the dessert enjoy a private patio with fruit tree and open-air oval iron tub, which can be used year round.

All guest quarters have been decorated in simple lines using natural materials so as to blend in with the surrounding nature. The unusually deep baths and showers are separated from the sleeping area only by white cotton curtains. And each guest room centers on what the architects call an 'inhabitable window”: large, deep, glassed-in pop-outs with settees where guests can sit to contemplate the desert in silence.

The hotel also offers a seasonal outdoor pool plus restaurant serving the finest in natural cuisine including many vegetarian offerings.

Outdoor activities that can be enjoyed from both lodgings include mountain biking, walking, bird watching or Segway tours of the nature park. Horses, tennis and paddle tennis are available in the vicinity of both hotels as well. The El Cerro 18 hole golf course is due to open shortly, only five minutes away.

Both of the outstanding properties offer a unique glimpse into southern Navarra, its major wine industry and a peek at what Spain considers its main bread basket, producing the finest asparagus, artichokes and piquillo peppers in all of Spain, if not the world.

Please contact us to prepare a custom travel package with accommodations at either one of these highly unique rural lodgings.