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. It is a tidy detail, repeated often enough that it now reads like settled history. It is not. That exact phrase, “word has it that he never ran with the bulls,” is a line of dialogue written by Hemingway’s own grandson, John Hemingway, inside a 2019 work of fiction called Bacchanalia: a Pamplona Story. It is a novelist’s aside about his grandfather, not a documented fact. The archival record says something different. A photograph held in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, published by the Hemingway Society, is captioned plainly: Hemingway in the 1925 encierro, in front of the bull.
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.
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.
The Line, the Novel It Came From, and the Photograph That Complicates It
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.
Somewhere in the retelling of that history, a specific claim took hold: that Hemingway wrote about the encierro but never ran in it himself. Trace that claim to its source and it leads to Bacchanalia: a Pamplona Story, a 2019 novel by John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson, who has run the encierro himself many times. In one passage, a character speculates that while Ernest likely kept returning to San Fermín for the drinking and the company, “word has it that he never ran with the bulls.” That is fiction, written affectionately, decades after the fact, by a family member who was not there.
The Hemingway Society, the literary foundation established in 1965 by Hemingway’s widow Mary, has published the photograph that undercuts the line. Captioned “Hemingway participating in the Encierro, in Pamplona, in 1925, Hemingway is in front of the bull,” and credited to the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, it places him inside the run itself during his third San Fermín visit, the same year he began drafting The Sun Also Rises. A widely repeated one liner about a famous writer, it turns out, is not the same thing as the writer’s actual archival record.
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.
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.
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?
Yes, at least once that is documented. A photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the JFK Presidential Library, published by the Hemingway Society, shows him in front of the bull during the 1925 encierro. The often repeated claim that he never ran comes from a line of dialogue in a 2019 novel written by his grandson, John Hemingway, not from any historical record.
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.