Most accounts of women running the encierro treat it as a footnote: a line noting that female runners are still a minority, or a passing mention that they “weren’t always allowed.” That framing understates what actually happened. Women were not simply discouraged from running Pamplona’s bull run. They were named specifically, alongside the elderly and children, in a municipal law that stayed on the books for 107 years, and the first women who broke it in 1975 did so by running inside a human shield of men built to keep them from being physically thrown off the course.
This matters because it changes what the modern participation gap actually is. Today, women make up roughly 6% of the encierro’s daily runners, according to Pamplona’s own city hall figures. It is easy to read that number as a simple reflection of personal choice or tradition. It is a more honest read once you know the exclusion was law, not custom, within the lifetime of people still running the course today, and that the law was enforced as much by the crowd of runners as by the police.
This article draws on the original text of Pamplona’s 1867 municipal ordinance as reported by Spanish national press, official city hall and festival-organization data on runner demographics, and the documented account of the two women credited as the first to run under the new rules in 1975.
The Law That Named Women Specifically
Pamplona’s first formal regulation of the bull run was issued on July 1, 1867. Before that date, the encierro existed in a legal gray zone: young men and butchers had been running ahead of the herds since at least the 16th century, but the city had never written rules for it. The 1867 ordinance changed that. It set the hour, defined the route, and established internal rules for what had been, until then, an unregulated and technically illegal practice.
Buried inside that same ordinance was Article 2. It prohibited “mujeres, ancianos y niños,” women, the elderly, and children, from “positioning themselves in the streets the cattle run through.” The rule was not a separate moral judgment about women and danger. It was one clause in a broader traffic and safety ordinance, sitting alongside articles about the route and the hour. But it named women explicitly, and it carried the same legal force as every other article in that document.
That clause remained in effect for 107 years. It survived the Spanish Civil War, the early decades of the Franco dictatorship, and the tourism boom that followed Ernest Hemingway’s writing about the fiesta. Women could watch the encierro from behind the fence. They could not be on the runners’ side of it.
1974, 1975, and the Human Shield
The ordinance was amended in 1974, opening the run to women on the same legal footing as men. No documentary record shows a woman actually running that first year. The first documented case comes from 1975, when Mariví Mendiburu and Alicia Rivas, at the time a correspondent for the magazine Cambio 16, ran the course together. According to Spanish press accounts, they did it surrounded by a group of men whose job was to keep them from being expelled.
That detail is the part most coverage skips. The law had changed, but the culture enforcing the old rule had not. Until the 1960s, it had been ordinary practice for the male runners themselves, not just the police, to physically pull women off the course if they tried to run. Mendiburu and Rivas needed a human buffer not because the bulls were more dangerous to them, but because the crowd around them might still have acted as if the 1867 rule were current.
Txus Elizondo, co-founder of the Basque women’s movement EAM (Emakume Askapenaren Mugimendua), described the broader climate of that decade to the Spanish news agency Efe: women’s role at the fiesta, in her account, was largely to wash their boyfriends’ running clothes and to be treated, at best, “like ornaments.” Sociologist Patricia Amigot, speaking to the same agency, offered a more measured read on how far things have moved since: “It’s been hard, but not as hard as in places where ‘tradition’ carries more weight.”
The repeal also landed at a specific political moment. It arrived in the final full year before Francisco Franco’s death, a period covered in more depth in encierro.com’s history of San Fermín under the dictatorship, when the regime’s grip on daily life across Spain, including on Navarra’s own festival culture, was visibly loosening.
Where Participation Stands Today
Pamplona’s official tourism materials describe the encierro as open to “everyone aged 18 or over who wishes to take part.” There is no legal barrier left. Yet more than five decades after the 1974 repeal, city hall’s own figures put women at approximately 6% of the roughly 4,000 people who run each morning. Some recent press estimates put the figure closer to 11%, but the 6% number is the one directly sourced to official city hall data rather than a general press estimate, so it is the more defensible baseline.
Female runners are called mozas; male runners, mozos. Both terms appear in the city council’s own materials and in the pre-run prayer recited on Cuesta de Santo Domingo each morning, which asks San Fermín’s blessing on “los mozos” as a group, not on men specifically.
Two women who ran in 2025 described the experience to Euronews. Yomara Martínez, 30, put it directly: “At the end of the day the bull doesn’t know about sexes, age or body shape. It doesn’t matter if you are a woman.” Paula López, 32, was more candid about why the numbers stay low: “I think many have a desire to see what it feels like but they don’t try because of fear.” Of her own experience as one of a handful of women in the crowd that morning, she said, “It is complicated but it is pretty exciting.”
The Real Safety Record, and the Real Risk
The encierro’s official historical record, maintained by the festival’s own organizers, individually names and documents every fatal goring in its history, sixteen deaths between 1910 and 2009. Every name on that list is male. No woman has died running the encierro in its documented history, a fact that runs against the instinct to assume mixed-gender participation in a dangerous event automatically means comparable risk across genders.
The documented risk to women at San Fermín has not come from the bulls. It has come from harassment. In 2016, five men, who had formed a WhatsApp group named “La Manada,” assaulted an 18-year-old woman during the festival. An initial lower-court ruling was widely seen in Spain as too lenient, and the case drew national outcry; Spain’s Supreme Court overturned it in 2019, convicting the men of rape and sentencing each to 15 years. Festival organizers have since said they increased security measures and police presence around the event. Anyone gored during the run, regardless of gender, is treated at the hospital that has handled Pamplona’s encierro injuries for nearly a century, a fact that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with proximity to the bulls.
The broader shift in how Pamplona’s institutions treat gender is visible elsewhere in fiesta culture too, including in traditions like Peña Anaitasuna, one of the city’s longest-running peñas and now a declared feminist organization, a reminder that the encierro’s 1974 rule change was one piece of a much longer, wider process, not an isolated fix.
Frequently Asked Questions
When were women first allowed to run the encierro?
The municipal ordinance banning women from the bull run route was repealed in 1974, after 107 years in force. The first documented case of women actually running came in 1975.
Who were the first women to run with the bulls in Pamplona?
Mariví Mendiburu and Alicia Rivas are the pair most commonly credited, based on Spanish press accounts, as the first women to run the encierro after the 1974 legal change. They ran in 1975 surrounded by a group of men to prevent being forced off the course.
What percentage of encierro runners are women?
Pamplona’s city hall data puts women at roughly 6% of the approximately 4,000 people who run the encierro each morning during San Fermín, though some press estimates in recent years put the figure as high as 11%.
Has a woman ever died running the encierro?
No. The festival’s own official record documents sixteen deaths from bull gorings between 1910 and 2009, and every one of them was a man.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.