The most famous movie images of the running of the bulls were not filmed in Pamplona. The 1957 adaptation of Hemingway’s novel shot its “Pamplona” in Morelia, Mexico. City Slickers gored Billy Crystal on a Universal Studios backlot in California. For most of a century, the cameras that made the encierro world famous were pointed at stand-ins.
That matters because the gap between the screen version and the real thing is exactly where visitors get hurt. Films compress 848.6 meters of stone street, six fighting bulls, and a few explosive minutes of documented chaos into a punchline or a triumph. People arrive in Pamplona each July carrying those images, and the street corrects them fast. Knowing which frames were real, and which were a backlot, is not trivia. It is the difference between understanding the running of the bulls in movies and understanding the run.
This article draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own Hemingway archives, the American Film Institute’s production catalog for the 1957 film, wire service reporting on Spain’s tourism ministry figures, and firsthand accounts from productions that staged the run. Every filming location claim below is documented.
The Thing That Put the Run on the Map Was a Novel, Not a Film
The first mass media moment for the encierro was print. Ernest Hemingway arrived at San Fermín for the first time on July 6, 1923, with his wife Hadley, on a recommendation from Gertrude Stein. He came back in 1924 and again in 1925, and that third fiesta handed him the characters and wreckage that became The Sun Also Rises, published in October 1926. The Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own Hemingway pages credit that novel with the definitive push that turned a regional Navarrese fiesta into one of the most famous festivals on earth.
It is worth being precise about what the novel actually did. It did not invent foreign attendance at the fiesta, and it did not describe the run in the loving tactical detail modern runners might expect. What it did was fix Pamplona in the international imagination as a place where something raw and dangerous still happened every morning at 8:00 AM. Nearly every film on this list exists downstream of that October 1926 publication date. Pamplona has returned the debt with a statue, a street named for the writer, and an archive the city still maintains. The festival’s celebrity guest list in the decades that followed grew directly out of the novel’s shadow, a story documented in Pamplona’s own municipal research on the famous visitors who followed Hemingway to San Fermín.
1957: Pamplona, Played by Morelia, Mexico
When Twentieth Century Fox adapted The Sun Also Rises in 1957, the production intended to shoot in Pamplona. It never meaningfully did. Principal photography began in March 1957 in Morelia, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, whose colonial stone streets stood in for Navarra, a substitution documented in the American Film Institute’s production catalog. Scheduling made a July shoot in Pamplona impossible, so the fiesta was rebuilt an ocean away with Mexican extras.
The one genuinely Pamplona element in the film is the run itself. Cinematographer Charles G. Clarke traveled to the fiesta and shot the actual encierro on Calle Estafeta, and that documentary footage was cut into the Morelia material. Audiences in 1957 watched real bulls and real runners for a few seconds, wrapped inside a Mexican stand-in city. Hemingway, never shy about the adaptation, singled out the Morelia substitution for criticism. The pattern set in 1957 held for decades: the run was real, the town around it was not.
1991: City Slickers and the Backlot Goring
The single most viewed running of the bulls scene in American film is probably the opening of City Slickers, where Billy Crystal’s character Mitch takes a horn from behind mid-run. The sequence is a hybrid, and an instructive one. The production sent a second unit to Spain to film the actual run, capturing real footage of the manada moving through the streets. Everything involving the actors, including the goring gag, was staged on a recreated Pamplona street on the Universal Studios backlot in California, under director Ron Underwood. Extras who worked the shoot have described running that artificial street take after take, thousands of miles from Navarra.
The scene earns a place in this history for one more reason. It planted the run in American pop culture as a bucket list comedy beat, a thing a midlife accountant does to feel alive. That framing has consequences on the street. A real cogida is not a sight gag, and the emergency medical operation Pamplona stages along the route each fiesta morning exists because horns do what the movie plays for laughs. The film made the run more famous and less understood at the same time, which is the recurring theme of the running of the bulls in movies pop culture story.
2011: The Bollywood Film That Actually Changed Who Comes
One production broke the stand-in pattern, and it came from Mumbai, not Hollywood. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, directed by Zoya Akhtar and released in 2011, filmed its climactic bull run in Pamplona itself, with leads Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, and Abhay Deol running on the actual route through Mercaderes and Estafeta, streets whose layout and dangers have their own documented history. The film was made in close collaboration with Turespaña, Spain’s tourism promotion agency, which secured permits and logistics without directly financing the production. It finished as the highest grossing Bollywood film of 2011.
Then something happened that no other film on this list can claim: a measurable demographic shift. According to figures from Spain’s industry and tourism ministry reported by AFP, 60,444 Indian travelers visited Spain in 2012, nearly double the number from the year of the film’s release, and the figure reached 85,000 by 2015. Turespaña’s London director described an immediate spike in visa requests, and India’s ambassador to Spain called the film singlehandedly responsible for making Spain a household name in India. Spain and India signed a film coproduction agreement the following year, and Lonely Planet launched a Spain guide aimed specifically at the Indian market in 2013. Anyone who has stood on Estafeta on a July morning in the last decade has seen the result in the crowd. One film did that. A closer look at how that single scene was actually filmed, and the PETA controversy it triggered, is in Encierro’s dedicated piece on the ZNMD bull run.
The Documentaries Finally Shot the Real Thing
Fiction kept faking the run, so it fell to documentary crews to film it honestly. The most complete of these is Chasing Red, released in 2015, which followed four runners, including Chicago writer Bill Hillmann and Spanish veteran David Ubeda, through all eight runs of the 2012 fiesta. It premiered at the LA Indie Film Festival in January 2015, took the Best of the Fest Grand Jury Prize, and was picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures. Full disclosure: the film was directed by Dennis Clancey, the founder of Encierro, which is precisely why this site exists at the intersection of film and the fiesta. The film’s production notes and streaming availability are at chasingredmovie.com.
What the documentaries capture that the features cannot is the run’s actual texture: the silence before the first cohete, the speed differential between a fit runner and a toro bravo, the way a fall in the callejón compounds. A camera on the fence at La Curva records something no backlot can reproduce. For viewers deciding what to watch before traveling to the fiesta, documentary footage of the real event teaches more in ten minutes than every fictional version combined, and a fuller viewing list is maintained on this site’s documentaries page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What movies feature the running of the bulls?
The best known are The Sun Also Rises (1957), adapted from Hemingway’s 1926 novel, City Slickers (1991), and the Bollywood film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011). Only Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara filmed its actors on the real route in Pamplona. The 1957 film used Morelia, Mexico as a stand-in with real second unit run footage, and City Slickers staged its actor scenes on a Universal Studios backlot.
Was City Slickers really filmed in Pamplona?
Not the scenes with the actors. A second unit filmed the real run in Spain, and that footage appears in the opening sequence, but Billy Crystal’s goring scene was shot on a recreated street at Universal Studios in California. Extras who appeared in the sequence have publicly described the backlot shoot.
Which Bollywood movie has the running of the bulls?
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), directed by Zoya Akhtar. Its climax was filmed in Pamplona with the three lead actors running the route. Spanish tourism ministry figures reported by AFP show Indian visits to Spain nearly doubled to 60,444 the year after release, one of the clearest documented cases of a single film moving tourism numbers.
Is there a documentary about the running of the bulls?
Yes, several. Chasing Red (2015), directed by Encierro founder Dennis Clancey, follows four runners through all eight runs of the 2012 fiesta and won the Grand Jury Prize at the LA Indie Film Festival before distribution by Magnolia Pictures. Documentary footage shows the real speed and danger of the encierro in a way fictional films never have.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.