Ask most English-language guides who put San Fermín on Hollywood’s map and you get one name: Ernest Hemingway. That is true as far as it goes, and it stops well short of what Pamplona’s own city archive has documented. A research project organized by the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona itself, drawing on hotel guestbooks, an unpublished 1957 photograph, on-the-record family testimony, and contemporary press, traces a four-decade wave of famous celebrities who followed Hemingway to San Fermín from the 1950s into the 1980s: an Oscar-winning director who filmed here three separate times, an actor who broke off from a Charlton Heston epic to watch the bulls run, a director who rebuilt London out of a Pamplona side street, a Nobel laureate who arrived decades later and called the fiesta “loaded with literature,” and a small crowd of screenwriters and studio names who never made the gossip pages but still signed the guestbook. Hemingway’s own attachment to the region went beyond the nine days of the fiesta itself, including the trout fishing trips near Burguete that made their way into his fiction.
The gap matters because it flattens San Fermín into a one-author phenomenon, when the record the city itself has assembled shows something closer to a decades-long relay: each generation of visitors discovering the same nine days, often staying at the same handful of downtown hotels, sometimes leaving nothing more than a signature and sometimes leaving an actual film scene, part of the longer story of the films that put the running of the bulls on the map. Getting the roster right, with names, dates, and hotels rather than a vague list that circulates without a single source attached, is worth doing properly.
What follows draws directly on the Ayuntamiento-organized 2018 exhibition “Recuperando Hemingway” (in Basque, “Hemingway bidaide”), researched with Filmoteca de Navarra, Planetario de Pamplona, the Archivo Municipal de Pamplona, and Hotels Tres Reyes and Yoldi, and reported in Diario de Noticias de Navarra, rather than the secondhand, undated tourist-blog version of this story that circulates in English. Pamplona’s own monument to Hemingway, a granite bust standing outside the Plaza de Toros, is where this story usually starts. It is a poor place to end it.
Orson Welles Came Three Times, and Left Without Paying His Hotel Bill
Orson Welles is the clearest case of a visitor English-language coverage almost entirely skips. Drawn to Pamplona partly through his friendship with Hemingway, Welles visited the city on at least three documented occasions: 1954, 1961, and 1966. He used the Hotel La Perla, on the Plaza del Castillo, as his informal headquarters during these stays, and reportedly left his final bill there unpaid, a detail Navarra’s own local press still repeats as evidence of the “canalla” (roguish) reputation he shared with Hemingway.
Welles wasn’t only visiting. He was working. Pamplona became a location for his long-troubled adaptation of Don Quixote, a project he shot intermittently between the late 1950s and the late 1960s and never finished in his lifetime; it was eventually assembled posthumously by director Jesús Franco and released in 1992. During his 1966 return, Welles personally filmed footage in San Fermín, and on a separate occasion shot the city’s own Gigantes procession, the giant figures that still open every morning of the fiesta, for use in the film. A surviving photograph of that shoot is part of the Ayuntamiento’s own exhibition record.
Welles also left a more literal trace: his signature in the guestbook of Hotel Tres Reyes, alongside a run of other names that rarely make it into English retellings, including Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck, Mary Welsh Hemingway (Ernest’s fourth wife), Margaux Hemingway, and actor Stacy Keach.
Charlton Heston Broke Off From Filming El Cid to Watch the Bulls Run
In July 1962, Charlton Heston was in Spain filming El Cid for director Anthony Mann and producer Samuel Bronston when he took a break to see San Fermín for himself. Local press reported his arrival in advance: he came into Pamplona on July 13 with his wife, Lydia, and their seven-year-old son, having dined the previous night in Aranda de Duero on the drive in.
Heston and his wife were received the next day at the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona by Mayor Miguel Javier Urmeneta, and Heston watched the morning’s encierro before offering the city a line the local press recorded and Pamplona still quotes: “I want you to pass on to all of Pamplona my gratitude for the fantastic moments I’ve had. The encierro is… well, I loved it.” Archival photographs of the visit, credited to the Ayuntamiento’s own archive, still exist and were republished as part of the city’s own retrospective reporting on the era.
A Guestbook Full of Golden-Age Names
Welles and Heston were not outliers. The Ayuntamiento’s own research states plainly that Pamplona residents saw, and some still remember seeing, Anthony Quinn, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, Richard Harris, Deborah Kerr, Lauren Bacall, and Sean Connery walking the city’s streets, with Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda named among the same group in a companion piece from the same research. Anthony Quinn stayed at Pamplona’s Hotel Yoldi in 1954 while preparing for the film The Magnificent Matador. A member of the family that has run the Yoldi for generations, Marcos Daspa, told journalists on the record at the 2018 exhibition opening about the night hotel staff moved Quinn to a different room after he was rude to a waitress; he apologized the next day and was allowed to stay.
Henry Fonda’s presence carries its own specific evidence: an unpublished photograph from 1957 shows him sneaking in as a working photographer at the wooden fencing of the encierro route itself, and the Yoldi’s own family history recalls the Fonda family always dining together at a table headed by Henry. Ava Gardner’s connection to the city rests on the same tier of evidence as Quinn’s: Hotel Yoldi’s family history records her making a brief visit to the hotel in the late 1950s, looking for a well-known matador of the era, Luis Miguel Dominguín, who was staying there at the time.
Beyond the Actors: The Screenwriters, a Producer, and a Director Who Rebuilt London on Calle Estella
The visitors weren’t only in front of the camera. Screenwriters Peter Viertel, Donald Ogden Stewart, and John Dos Passos passed through Pamplona, along with producer Darryl F. Zanuk, all less recognizable to a general audience but documented in the same municipal research, described in the city’s own account as coming through “without as much fuss.” Playwright Arthur Miller was among them, and he is on record with a direct assessment of the encierro: “I had never seen anything like it. The Encierro is a unique spectacle.”
Director George C. Scott used Pamplona itself as a filming location, recreating a London street on the city’s Calle Estella for his film Patton. It is one of the more specific, verifiable film-history facts about Pamplona that has almost no footprint in English-language coverage of the city, buried instead in the Ayuntamiento’s own archival research.
After Hollywood’s Golden Age: A Nobel Laureate, a Basketball Hall of Famer, and a Sitcom Star
The visitors didn’t stop when the studio era ended; they just changed shape. In 2005, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa came to Pamplona to receive the honorary title of Bodeguero Mayor del Reino, a distinction the region traces back to 13th-century Navarra and revived, briefly, in the 2000s. He watched the mozos run the encierro from a balcony and told local press that San Fermín is a fiesta “cargada de literatura,” loaded with literature, its myth having “gone around the world” thanks to that literary tradition, Hemingway included but not alone. It wasn’t his first visit; he had experienced the fiesta once before, decades earlier, and found the same rites intact. That “myth” framing has company: Pamplona’s own patron saint carries a founding story the city’s own archives can’t fully stand behind either, a reminder that San Fermín’s mythology and its documented history are not always the same thing, for saints or for celebrities.
In July 2004, former NBA forward Dennis Rodman ran the encierro as part of a charity event raising money for multiple sclerosis research, alongside an MS patient named Ray Sabbatini. A decade later, in July 2014, Charlie Sheen turned up in Pamplona, initially trying to keep a low profile before being recognized and photographed at the festival. Neither carries quite the same documentary weight as Welles filming the Gigantes or Heston’s thank-you note to the Ayuntamiento, but both extend the same pattern: San Fermín keeps attracting names far beyond the one everybody already knows. For readers who want the on-screen version of that history rather than the guestbook version, Encierro keeps its own running list of documentaries about the encierro and San Fermín.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Ernest Hemingway actually discover San Fermín?
No. Hemingway popularized San Fermín internationally through The Sun Also Rises, but he did not discover the fiesta, which long predates his first 1923 visit. What the record shows is that his writing turned San Fermín into a magnet for several decades of American and European visitors who followed, from Orson Welles in the 1950s to Mario Vargas Llosa in the 2000s.
Did Ava Gardner really visit San Fermín?
The evidence is real but modest: Hotel Yoldi’s own family history, part of the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s 2018 archival research, records a brief visit by Gardner to the hotel in the late 1950s while looking for a matador who was staying there, and the same research states that Pamplona residents saw her, along with other stars, walking the city’s streets. It is not a Hollywood-scale documented stay the way Welles’s three visits or Heston’s Ayuntamiento reception are, but it is not an unfounded rumor either.
Which actors are documented visiting San Fermín?
Orson Welles (1954, 1961, 1966, also filming there), Anthony Quinn (1954), and Charlton Heston (1962) are documented by name, date, and hotel or municipal record. Gregory Peck, Deborah Kerr, Richard Harris, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and Ava Gardner are documented through hotel guestbook signatures, an unpublished 1957 photograph, family testimony, and residents’ own memory from the same municipal research.
Has anyone famous visited San Fermín in more recent years?
Yes. Novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa visited in 2005 to receive an honorary regional title, former NBA player Dennis Rodman ran the encierro for charity in 2004, and actor Charlie Sheen attended the festival in 2014.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.