Every English-language account of Ernest Hemingway’s visits to San Fermín traces back, whether it says so or not, to a single 1970 book: Hemingway y los Sanfermines. Its author was a Navarrese lawyer named José María Iribarren, and almost none of the writing that borrows from his research bothers to say who he was.
That gap matters for more than credit. José María Iribarren was a Navarrese writer and folklorist, not a Hemingway specialist who happened to write one book about him. He was Navarra’s own chronicler of its speech, its sayings, and its festival, and the Hemingway book was one project among a body of work built over four decades. Reading about Hemingway in Pamplona without knowing who Iribarren was is like reading a translation without knowing who did the translating.
This profile draws on Iribarren’s own bibliography, the biographical entry maintained by the Real Academia Española’s peer institutions, the Auñamendi Eusko Entziklopedia published by the Basque studies society Eusko Ikaskuntza, and Navarra’s own Príncipe de Viana cultural institution, whose journal Iribarren wrote for across three decades.
A Tudela Lawyer Who Became Navarra’s Most-Read Writer
José María Iribarren Rodríguez was born in Tudela on October 31, 1906, and died in Pamplona on June 11, 1971. He and his brother, Jesús Luis, were orphaned young and raised in Tudela by their maternal grandmother, who ran a wine-making business in the town. The Jesuit school of San Francisco Javier in Tudela gave him his early education; law studies at the Universidad de Deusto gave him his profession.
He practiced law in Madrid in the late 1920s while also studying literature, then returned to Tudela in 1931 to share a legal practice with his brother. That same year, on November 14, 1931, the two of them launched an independent weekly newspaper called Navarra. It lasted until 1935, and the Navarrese scholar Ricardo Ollaquindia has written that its pages already contained, in embryonic form, the linguistic and folk-custom subjects Iribarren would spend the rest of his life developing into full books.
During the 1936 uprising, General Emilio Mola, who led the rebellion in Navarra, requested Iribarren as his personal secretary; Iribarren later served in the rebels’ military legal corps and wrote two books connected to that period. After the war he returned to civil law, practicing alongside the writing career that would eventually eclipse it. By the time of his death, multiple scholars had already concluded that he was the most-read and most-published Navarrese writer of the entire contemporary era, a period stretching back through the 19th century.
The Vocabulario Navarro and a Career Spent Cataloging Navarrese Speech
Iribarren’s reputation as a folklorist began in 1941, when he started contributing ethnographic and folk-custom pieces to the newly founded journal of the Institución Príncipe de Viana, Navarra’s principal cultural and research institution. He eventually became president of the institution’s Folklore section.
His most consequential book followed in 1952: Vocabulario navarro, a lexical survey of regional Navarrese speech that later scholarship has called one of the best popular-speech repertoires anywhere in the Hispanic world. He expanded it further with Adiciones al vocabulario navarro in 1958. Three years after the original volume, in 1955, he published El porqué de los dichos, a study of the origins and histories behind Spanish proverbs, idioms, and sayings. It remains in print today, reissued across multiple editions since its first publication, and it is still the reference many Spanish readers reach for when they want to know where a common saying actually came from.
The scholarly world recognized the work as it appeared. In 1954, the Real Academia Española, Spain’s authority on the Spanish language, named him a corresponding academic. He also became a corresponding member of Euskaltzaindia, the Real Academia de la Lengua Vasca, and of Zaragoza’s Institución Fernando el Católico, an honorary member of the Academia Tucumana de Folklore in Argentina, and a board member of Spain’s national research council, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Pregón, and Two Decades of Writing and Drawing San Fermín
Iribarren was also a trained draftsman. In 1942, he was among a group of Navarrese writers and intellectuals who agreed to launch a new literary magazine timed to the festival; it debuted the following July during the 1943 San Fermín celebrations under the name Pregón. Iribarren contributed both writing and his own illustrations to Pregón for the next 25 years, working alongside other noted illustrators of the magazine.
This is the part of Iribarren’s career that connects most directly to his later Hemingway research. Pregón was, and remains, a magazine built entirely around San Fermín, and a quarter-century of writing for it meant Iribarren was documenting the festival’s culture and characters, foreign visitors included, in real time, year after year, long before he sat down to write a book specifically about the American novelist who kept coming back.
1970: Two Books in His Final Working Year
In 1970, a year before his death, Iribarren published two books at once. Sanfermines was a full history of the festival itself. Hemingway y los Sanfermines was a book-length account of Hemingway’s visits to San Fermín, and it became the standard Spanish-language reference on the subject. Every later Hemingway-in-Pamplona account, in Spanish or English, builds on research Iribarren did first.
By the time Iribarren sat down to write about Hemingway, the fiesta itself had spent decades under a dictatorship that reshaped San Fermín and used Hemingway’s own fame to promote it abroad. Hemingway, for his part, kept returning to Pamplona for decades, drinking at his favorite tavern after the encierro between runs. Iribarren’s book was the first to trace that whole arc of visits in one place.
A later, expanded edition updated the book with Hemingway scholarship and sources that were not available to Iribarren in 1970. And in 2021, translator Martin Roberts published an English edition, titled Hemingway in Pamplona, reconstructing Hemingway’s successive visits to the Festival of San Fermín between 1923 and 1959 for readers who cannot access the original Spanish. Iribarren died in Pamplona on June 11, 1971, less than a year after both 1970 books reached readers.
Why Iribarren Still Matters to Anyone Reading About San Fermín Today
Every modern account of Hemingway’s relationship with San Fermín, including the version most English-speaking readers eventually encounter, rests on research one Navarrese lawyer did first, using access and fluency no outside biographer could match. The same is true of Navarrese vocabulary: anyone consulting a glossary of Navarra’s regional speech today is, whether they know it or not, working downstream of the survey Iribarren compiled in 1952.
A public school in Pamplona now carries his name, and Navarra’s cultural press still runs retrospective coverage of his work decades after his death. Anyone consulting Encierro’s own reference on San Fermín and encierro vocabulary today is, in a broader sense, working in the same tradition Iribarren helped establish in 1952. For a figure this frequently cited and this rarely introduced, that is the gap this profile is meant to close.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was José María Iribarren?
José María Iribarren Rodríguez (1906 to 1971) was a Navarrese lawyer, journalist, and folklorist from Tudela who became Navarra’s most-read writer of the contemporary era. He is best known for Vocabulario navarro (1952), a survey of Navarrese regional speech, and for Hemingway y los Sanfermines (1970), the standard reference on Ernest Hemingway’s visits to the San Fermín festival.
What did José María Iribarren write about Hemingway?
In 1970, Iribarren published Hemingway y los Sanfermines, a book-length account documenting Hemingway’s successive visits to the San Fermín festival. It became the foundational Spanish-language source that later Hemingway-in-Pamplona writing, in both Spanish and English, continues to draw from.
Is there an English translation of Iribarren’s Hemingway book?
Yes. Translator Martin Roberts published an English edition titled Hemingway in Pamplona in 2021, reconstructing Hemingway’s visits to the festival between 1923 and 1959 for English-language readers.
What is Iribarren’s Vocabulario Navarro?
Vocabulario navarro is a 1952 lexical survey of regional Navarrese speech, later expanded with a 1958 supplement. Scholarship on Spanish regional lexicography has called it one of the best popular-speech repertoires compiled anywhere in the Hispanic world, and it remains a standard reference on how Navarra speaks.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.