A single line keeps resurfacing in articles about Ernest Hemingway and San Fermín: word has it that Hemingway himself never actually ran with the bulls, that he only wrote about the men who did. Depending on who you ask, that line is either an urban myth or the family’s own quiet correction of the record.
The line first appeared in print as dialogue in Bacchanalia: A Pamplona Story, the 2019 novel by Hemingway’s grandson John Hemingway, author of the earlier family memoir Strange Tribe (2007). But it is not only fiction. Encierro’s Dennis Clancey has known John Hemingway for years, dating back to 2011, when Pamplona gave him the Güiri del Año award, the city’s honor for outsiders who have become part of the fiesta’s fabric. Kukuxumusu, the Pamplona brand behind the award, presented John Hemingway with that year’s title at a ceremony at Restaurante Europa, and Clancey was there. In the years since, John has told Clancey directly, in person, that he does not believe his grandfather ever ran with the bulls. That is a family member’s firsthand account, not a line written for a character.
The documented record backs him up more than the popular retelling admits. Writing in Smithsonian magazine’s 2025 centennial retrospective on the 1925 trip, journalist Tony Perrottet, drawing on Michael Reynolds’ biography Hemingway: The Paris Years, states plainly: “There is no record of Hemingway ever running with the bulls himself.” What is documented is that Hemingway and his male friends joined the crowds in the bullring afterward, for what was then called amateur hour, when young bulls with padded horns were released into the stadium for spectators, tourists included, to test their nerve against. On that same 1925 trip, his friend Harold Loeb managed to sit on a bull’s head in the ring and get carried around, briefly stealing Pamplona’s attention from Hemingway entirely.
That distinction matters for the photograph at the center of this debate. A picture in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, published by the Hemingway Society, is captioned: Hemingway in the 1925 encierro, in front of the bull. The image shows a packed arena and a dirt floor, with a bull down among a knot of men in the ring, not an open street. That setting is consistent with the amateur bullring hour Reynolds and Perrottet describe, not the street encierro that runs down Estafeta and into the stadium at 8 a.m. A photograph captioned decades after the fact, identifying one man among a crowd in an arena, reflects an archivist’s best judgment of what it depicts, not certainty about which specific event it captures.
Put together, the strongest documented account of Hemingway’s 1925 trip does not describe him running the street encierro, and the photograph offered as proof is, at minimum, consistent with the version where he didn’t. That is not the same as declaring the question closed; no comparable source explicitly places him in the street run either, and absence of a documented claim is not proof of absence of the event. What can be said plainly is that John Hemingway’s insistence that his grandfather never ran is not a novelist’s flourish invented for a book. It is a family position, held in person and on the record, and the best available documentary source on the 1925 trip supports it rather than contradicts it.
Getting this straight matters for more than trivia’s sake. 2026 marks 100 years since Scribner’s published The Sun Also Rises on 22 October 1926, the novel that took a regional Navarran fiesta and turned it into an international fixture on the literary map. A myth this durable, about the very author whose writing is credited with making San Fermín famous, is worth tracing back to its actual source rather than repeating on faith. It also opens a door to a part of this story that rarely gets told in English: Pamplona’s own relationship with the Hemingway legend is not simple gratitude. In 2023, a group of Navarran writers put Hemingway on mock trial, in the clubhouse of one of the city’s own peñas, over exactly what his fame had done to their fiesta.
The novel’s reach went beyond the fiesta scenes themselves. One quieter detail, a night walk along the city walls where characters spot the lights of a fort on the mountain above Pamplona, points to a real, documented place with its own history, covered in Encierro’s account of Fuerte de San Cristóbal.
What follows draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published Hemingway archive, the Hemingway Society’s research (which cites the JFK Presidential Library’s photographic holdings directly), and Spanish and international press coverage of the 2023 trial and the novel’s 2026 centenary.
Nine Visits, and Where the Photograph Fits
Ernest Hemingway visited the Sanfermines nine times across his life: 1923 through 1927, then 1929, 1931, 1953, and 1959, according to the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own record. He and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, arrived in Pamplona for the first time on 6 July 1923, at the recommendation of Gertrude Stein, who told them the small Navarran city was worth the detour from Paris. He kept coming back, and Café Iruña, the Belle Époque cafe on the Plaza del Castillo that opened in 1888, became his regular base in the old quarter, along with Casa Marceliano, his favorite tavern after the encierro. The definitive account of those visits was later compiled by the Navarrese folklorist José María Iribarren, whose 1970 book on Hemingway still anchors most serious accounts of his time in the city.
From 1925 through 1931, his base was the Hotel Quintana, run by Juanito Quintana, a bullfighting devotee who became one of Hemingway’s closest friends in Spain and the acknowledged real-world model for “Hotel Montoya” in The Sun Also Rises. The friendship was genuine, and it survived real friction. In a later interview, Quintana remembered Hemingway unflatteringly, as “a very strange person” with “a bad character,” recalling nights when Hemingway’s entourage stumbled in drunk at 3 a.m. and drew complaints from other guests. When Quintana finally confronted him over the noise, he warned Hemingway that if he kept the matador Cayetano Ordóñez awake, “tomorrow you’ll be fighting in the bullring yourself.” Hemingway backed down. Whatever tension existed between them, it did not end the friendship: Quintana arranged Hemingway’s lodging again on his return visits in 1953 and 1959, and Hemingway had a copy of the freshly published Sun Also Rises sent to him by name in 1927.
Which Hotel, and When: Untangling Hotel Quintana From the Gran Hotel La Perla
There is a second, separate piece of Hemingway lore in Pamplona worth untangling on its own merits: whether Ernest actually stayed at the Gran Hotel La Perla, the hotel on Pamplona’s Plaza del Castillo that today keeps a Hemingway Suite and markets its history around him. To be clear, nobody disputes that Hemingway stayed at hotels in Pamplona for decades. The dispute is about which hotel, and when.
Pamplona’s own tourism office runs two separate pages that do not fully agree with each other. The La Perla page states that Hemingway and his party stayed there during the 1924 Sanfermines, citing Bernice Kert’s biography The Hemingway Women, drawn from an interview with Hadley Richardson, and a letter Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein from the hotel that year. The separate Hotel Quintana page states that Hemingway was recommended to that hotel in Madrid in June 1924, stayed there the last days of the 1924 festival, and returned every year through 1931. Wikipedia’s entry on the Gran Hotel La Perla adds a further correction: the hotel “is sometimes mistakenly identified as the model for the novel’s Hotel Montoya,” citing an academic Hemingway glossary, when “Hotel Montoya was actually inspired by Juanito Quintana’s hotel.”
Smithsonian magazine’s 2025 reporting resolves part of the discrepancy. It places Hemingway’s La Perla stays specifically in the 1950s, on his return trips in 1953 and 1959, in a room overlooking the bull-running route, a room the hotel still preserves and shows visitors today. That account does not mention an earlier 1924 stay at La Perla at all. So the most specific, corroborated claim about where Hemingway stayed in 1924 points to Hotel Quintana, not La Perla, and La Perla’s own claim to that particular year rests on a secondary biography and a letter’s dateline rather than a hotel ledger or a photograph. That is a real, documented gap in the earlier part of the story, not just a family member’s suspicion. What is not in dispute: by the 1950s, Hemingway was a genuine, regular guest of the Gran Hotel La Perla, and the hotel’s connection to him from that period on is well documented.
The same city page that makes La Perla’s case also records that John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson, visited the Gran Hotel La Perla during the 2014 Sanfermines, stepping into the hotel that has built part of its identity around his grandfather’s name and legacy. For the fuller history of that hotel itself, including its founding, its cholera-epidemic origin story, and exactly which years its Hemingway connection is strongest, see this site’s dedicated account of Gran Hotel La Perla.
What The Sun Also Rises Actually Is
The Sun Also Rises is not, strictly speaking, a Pamplona novel. Most of it is not even set there. The bulk of the book takes place in Paris, with additional sections in San Sebastián, Bayonne, and Madrid. Only a central stretch of the story unfolds during San Fermín itself, when a group of American and British expatriates travels down from Paris for the fiesta. That is a detail standard coverage tends to skip past when it credits the book with putting Pamplona on the map, as though the entire novel lived inside the festival week.
Hemingway wrote the bulk of the first draft in a concentrated stretch between July and September 1925, working from the trip he had just taken to San Fermín that summer, the visit Gertrude Stein had originally encouraged. Scribner’s published it on 22 October 1926. Its plain, stripped down prose style, a deliberate break from the ornate literary conventions of the era, became one of the defining voices of what Stein herself had named the “lost generation,” the young Americans and Europeans left unmoored by the First World War. The novel’s characters carry that unmoored quality with them into Pamplona’s streets, and it is the collision between their restlessness and the fiesta’s noise, color, and structure that gave the book its lasting pull on readers who had never set foot in Navarra. One of those Pamplona details is real and still standing: the scene where Jake Barnes walks up to the city’s cathedral, admits the facade once struck him as ugly, and goes inside anyway is set at the actual Catedral de Santa María la Real, the same building whose neoclassical front critics from Victor Hugo onward have mocked for close to two centuries.
The Year Pamplona Put Hemingway on Trial
On 8 June 2023, to mark the 100th anniversary of Hemingway’s first visit, the Navarre Writers Association staged a mock trial of Ernest Hemingway at the headquarters of peña Anaitasuna, one of Pamplona’s own social clubs. The charge, only half in jest: that Hemingway was the root cause of the commercialization and overcrowding that now define San Fermín for outsiders. A jury drawn by lottery from the audience heard the case.
Writer Miguel Izu argued the defense, calling it an exaggeration to pin the modern crowds on one author, and noting that the great majority of visitors created few problems while contributing significantly to the local economy. Writer Idoia Saralegui argued the opposing view, put simply: “many more people come because he put it in his book.” The jury’s verdict credited Hemingway rather than condemned him, concluding he had not degraded the festival but had instead helped “propagate global knowledge of the fiestas” and contributed to “the tourist development of the city.” Hemingway was exonerated, in a Navarran clubhouse, by a jury of Pamplonicas.
The trial was staged with humor, but the question behind it was not invented for the occasion. It sits inside a century old, genuinely unresolved argument the city has been having with itself about its most famous foreign witness. The trial only weighed Hemingway’s own share of the blame, though; the fuller story of how San Fermín became a mass global event runs through three later, larger forces his novel alone never touched.
A Legacy the City Still Argues About
The 22 year gap in that visit list between 1931 and 1953 was not incidental. Franco’s government had declared Hemingway persona non grata over his support for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, part of San Fermín’s own complicated entanglement with the dictatorship in the decades that followed. Alice B. Toklas, the same woman whose partner Gertrude Stein first sent Hemingway to Pamplona, later said the city was ruined for her “on account of Hemingway.” Hemingway himself seemed to sense the irony. Writing decades later in The Dangerous Summer, he described returning to find the city “all there, as it always was, except forty thousand tourists have been added.” He had watched his own fame reshape the place that made him.
That ambivalence has not faded. Pamplona literature professor Gabriel Insausti has said Hemingway “has become a product of a franchise associated with the San Fermín festival that has obscured his novel,” and recalls a Pamplona bar that once hung a sign reading simply “Hemingway was not here,” worn as a point of local pride rather than an oversight. Meanwhile the demographic reality Hemingway’s fame helped set in motion persists: in 2022, Americans made up 16% of encierro runners, according to Pamplona city hall data reported by Reuters, four times the share from France, the next largest foreign group. A century after a young newspaperman took Gertrude Stein’s advice and got off a train in a small Navarran city he had never seen, his readers are still showing up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Ernest Hemingway ever run with the bulls in Pamplona?
It’s genuinely disputed, and the documented evidence leans toward no. Smithsonian magazine’s 2025 reporting, drawing on Michael Reynolds’ biography, states there is no record of Hemingway running the street encierro himself; he and his friends took part in the separate amateur bullring hour that follows the run. A 1925 photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Presidential Library, captioned as showing him in front of the bull, is consistent with that arena event rather than proof he ran the street course. Hemingway’s own grandson, John Hemingway, has told Encierro’s Dennis Clancey directly that he does not believe his grandfather ever ran.
Did Hemingway stay at the Gran Hotel La Perla in Pamplona?
Later in life, yes, and it’s well documented: on his return visits in 1953 and 1959, Hemingway stayed at the Gran Hotel La Perla in a room overlooking the bull-running route. But the specific claim that he stayed there in 1924 is disputed. Pamplona’s own tourism pages contradict each other on this point, and a separate city page documents that his actual base that year, and every year from 1925 through 1931, was the now-closed Hotel Quintana, not La Perla. That gap holds up independently of any personal account: Wikipedia notes that La Perla is sometimes mistakenly identified with the novel’s Hotel Montoya, when that hotel was actually modeled on Hotel Quintana.
When was The Sun Also Rises published?
Scribner’s published The Sun Also Rises on 22 October 1926, making 2026 its 100th anniversary year. Hemingway wrote most of the first draft the previous year, between July and September 1925, drawing on the San Fermín trip he had taken that summer.
Why did Pamplona put Hemingway on trial?
On 8 June 2023, the Navarre Writers Association staged a mock trial at peña Anaitasuna’s clubhouse to mark the 100th anniversary of Hemingway’s first Pamplona visit, weighing whether his fame was responsible for San Fermín’s modern overcrowding. A lottery drawn jury ultimately exonerated him, crediting him with spreading global knowledge of the fiesta rather than damaging it.
Is The Sun Also Rises set entirely in Pamplona?
No. Most of the novel takes place in Paris, with further sections in San Sebastián, Bayonne, and Madrid. Only a central portion of the book is set during the San Fermín fiesta itself, even though that section is the part most readers remember.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.