Between 1939 and 1975, San Fermín was not left alone by the Spanish state. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship first folded the fiesta into a program of national Catholic symbolism meant to manufacture consent for the new regime, then, a generation later, sold that same fiesta to the world as proof the regime had nothing to hide. Both things are true, and most English language accounts of San Fermín’s history skip past them entirely.
This matters because the standard version of San Fermín’s story, medieval origin, Hemingway’s 1923 arrival, modern spectacle, leaves out the four decades in which the festival was a political instrument, not just a cultural one. A visitor who only knows the Hemingway myth is missing why that myth existed in the first place: Franco’s own government spent two decades deciding what to do with a writer it had once banned, because that writer had become the fastest route to convincing the world Spain was open for business.
What follows draws on the 2022 academic essay collection El franquismo se fue de fiesta, published by the Universitat de València and coordinated by historians César Rina and Claudio Hernández, whose chapter on San Fermín specifically was written by Francisco Javier Caspistegui, along with the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published Hemingway history and the official Spanish state gazette record of San Fermín’s 1965 tourism designation.
1937 and 1938: Two Summers Without a Fiesta
Navarra fell under Nationalist military control within days of the July 1936 uprising, and the province became one of the war’s earliest and most solidly held rear areas for Franco’s forces. Even so, the Sanfermines themselves did not run in 1937 or 1938. The civic and popular side of the festival, the dancing, the processions, the packed streets Hemingway had described a decade earlier, was set aside while the war continued elsewhere in Spain.
It is worth pausing on what this means for the fiesta’s later political usefulness. A festival tradition that had survived the Napoleonic invasion and two separate Carlist wars in the nineteenth century was, within living memory of most Pamplona residents in 1939, freshly interrupted rather than ancient and untouchable. That made it available. A living tradition that had just gone quiet for two years was, to the new regime moving into peacetime, a canvas rather than a monument, something that could be reintroduced on the state’s own terms rather than something the state had to work around.
That reintroduction did not happen by accident, and it did not happen the same way twice across the following decades. San Fermín shared this fate with fiestas across Spain. The same academic research that documents the wartime interruption of the Sanfermines also traces parallel suspensions and restarts in Valencia, Andalusia, and Catalunya, evidence that Pamplona’s experience was part of a nationwide pattern rather than a local decision made in isolation. The rest of this article traces how that pattern played out specifically for San Fermín, across two distinct phases with two very different goals.
Fascistization: How the Postwar Regime Reframed the Fiesta
Historians César Rina and Claudio Hernández use a specific word for what happened next across Spain’s major popular festivals, including San Fermín: fascistization. Their 2022 essay collection argues that Franco’s government, in the years immediately after the war, treated tightly organized popular gatherings as what Rina calls a social anesthetic, a way to secure public acceptance that did not rely purely on the regime’s own machinery of repression and control.
For San Fermín specifically, Francisco Javier Caspistegui’s chapter in that collection describes a fiesta pulled into a nacionalcatólica framework, the wedding of Catholic religious symbolism to state nationalism that defined so much of Francoist public culture in the 1940s. The saint’s own feast day, the religious procession, and the civic ceremony around the Ayuntamiento all offered the regime existing infrastructure it could recast rather than invent. This was not unique to Pamplona. The same academic collection documents nearly identical treatment applied to Valencia’s Fallas and Andalusia’s Semana Santa processions in the same years, a coordinated pattern rather than a single local decision.
Rina’s own summary of the mechanism is direct: tightly controlled and properly organized popular groupings functioned as what he calls an anesthetic balm for the population, a way of building acceptance for the new order that did not depend solely on the machinery of state control. For San Fermín this meant a fiesta still recognizably itself on the surface, the same streets, the same saint’s day, while its public meaning was steered toward reinforcing the legitimacy of the government that now presided over it.
What makes San Fermín’s case distinct is what happened once the fiesta had a second use available to it, one the regime had not originally planned for and initially worked against.
Persona Non Grata: Banning, Then Inviting Back, the Fiesta’s Most Famous Witness
Ernest Hemingway visited the Sanfermines nine times across his life, per the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published record: 1923 through 1927, then 1929, 1931, 1953, and 1959. He was far from the only celebrity San Fermín’s later international fame would attract, but he was the first, and the one whose relationship with the regime was the most complicated. The gap between 1931 and 1953 was not incidental. Hemingway’s commitment to the Republican cause during the Civil War, and his authorship of For Whom the Bell Tolls, got him declared persona non grata by Franco’s government, and his books were censored in Spain for decades afterward, according to the city’s own account of his history there.
In 1953, the regime allowed him back. He returned to Pamplona after a 22 year absence from the festival, reportedly working on material for an updated edition of Death in the Afternoon. He came back again in 1954 and 1956, and made his ninth and final Sanfermines visit in 1959, the same year Life magazine commissioned him to cover a rivalry between two star matadors for a feature that became The Dangerous Summer, splashed across one of the most widely read magazines in the United States. Hollywood had already been drawn to the same material years earlier, though as the real production record shows, the version of Pamplona audiences saw on screen and the version Franco’s government was managing behind the cameras were not quite the same city.
The regime that had banned Hemingway’s books for glorifying the side it had defeated in the Civil War was, within a single decade, actively benefiting from his byline. Caspistegui’s research describes the calculation plainly: international press coverage built around Hemingway’s presence let the dictatorship project an image of openness and tolerance abroad, whatever the contradiction of using a Republic sympathizing author to do it. Pamplona’s own residents, in the meantime, adjusted to a tourist boom driven by authorities eager to capitalize on it.
Spain Is Different: Fraga, 1965, and the Tourism Takeover
The clearest evidence that San Fermín’s political usefulness had shifted from ideology to economics arrived on 10 July 1962, when Manuel Fraga Iribarne was named Minister of Information and Tourism. Fraga, who held the post until 1969, is credited with building the “Spain is Different” campaign, the slogan and marketing push that recast the entire country, dictatorship included, as an accessible, sun soaked holiday destination for a growing wave of foreign visitors and their currency.
San Fermín became a formal instrument of that strategy on paper, not just in spirit. In 1965, the Subsecretaría de Turismo declared San Fermín a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Internacional, an official state designation recorded in the Boletín Oficial del Estado. The same year’s list included Valencia’s Fallas, Andalusia’s Romería de El Rocío, and the Misterio de Elche, a cohort of exactly the festivals the postwar regime had spent the 1940s absorbing into its own national mythology, now repurposed as certified tourism product for an international market.
The through line from 1939 to 1965 is a single festival used two different ways by the same government: first as a tool to manufacture domestic legitimacy through religious and nationalist symbolism, then as a certified export good sold on the strength of a foreign writer the regime had once tried to erase. Franco’s dictatorship ended with his death in 1975, and San Fermín’s character shifted again in the decades of Spanish democracy that followed, a separate and later story than the one told here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was San Fermín cancelled during the Spanish Civil War?
Yes. The Sanfermines did not take place in 1937 or 1938, even though Navarra was under Nationalist control for nearly the entire war. The festival’s civic and popular events were suspended while fighting continued elsewhere in Spain, and celebrations resumed after the war ended in 1939.
Why was Ernest Hemingway banned from Spain by Franco?
Hemingway supported the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls from that perspective. Franco’s government declared him persona non grata as a result, and his books were censored in Spain for decades. He did not return to Pamplona for 22 years because of it.
When did Ernest Hemingway return to Pamplona after the ban?
Hemingway returned to the Sanfermines in 1953, after the Franco government eased its restrictions on him. He visited again in 1954 and 1956, and made his final trip to Pamplona in 1959, the year Life magazine sent him to cover the season for what became The Dangerous Summer.
What is “Spain is Different” and how does it connect to San Fermín?
“Spain is Different” was the tourism marketing campaign built under Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who became Minister of Information and Tourism in 1962. San Fermín was formally declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Internacional in 1965 as part of the same government strategy to promote Spain, dictatorship and all, as an open destination for foreign visitors.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.