Ten days after the last “Pobre de mí” fades in Pamplona’s Plaza Consistorial, a second encierro starts running, on a different route, in a different city, for a different saint. It is not a copy of San Fermín and it is not a tourist reenactment. Tudela, Navarra’s second-largest city, has run its own bulls through its own streets every summer since long before anyone outside Spain had heard of Hemingway, and it does so again every July 25 through 30 as part of the Fiestas de Tudela, held in honor of Santa Ana.
Most visitors who fall in love with San Fermín never learn this exists. That is a real gap, not a small one: it means missing the fact that running with bulls in Navarra was never a single-city phenomenon built around one saint. It was, and still is, a shared regional practice, and Tudela’s version reveals a different, older thread of it, one tied to a plague, a saint, and a vow the city has now kept for essentially five centuries.
What follows draws on Tudela’s own municipal historical notice for its patron saint’s day, an academic treatment of the city’s Marian devotions published through Dialnet, the Gran Enciclopedia de Navarra’s entry on Navarra’s giant-and-bighead troupes, and contemporaneous local press coverage of the modern encierro and fiesta program.
Santa Ana, the Plague, and a Vow That Still Runs the Calendar
The Fiestas de Tudela exist because of a 1530 epidemic. Plague was moving through the towns of the Ribera that year, and Tudela’s city council, desperate, turned to Santa Ana, the mother of the Virgin Mary. On June 21, 1530, the council held a special mass called the “Salud” (“Health”) mass and made a voto perpetuo, a perpetual vow: if Santa Ana freed the city from the plague, Tudela would celebrate her feast day every single year afterward, with a solemn, devout procession carrying her image through the streets.
The plague passed. The city kept its word. A letter the Tudela council sent to the viceroy of Navarra in 1531 confirms the change formally: Santa Ana was named patroness of the city, replacing San Pedro Ad-Víncula, specifically in gratitude for delivering the Ribera’s capital from the sickness. That correspondence is one of the reasons historians can date the switch precisely rather than relying on local legend.
Nearly five hundred years later, the terms of that 1530 vow still structure the week. The fiesta opens with a rocket fired from Plaza de los Fueros at noon on July 24 and runs, uninterrupted, until midnight on July 30. A solemn procession still carries Santa Ana’s image through Tudela’s old quarter, accompanied by the city’s gigantes and cabezudos, the municipal band, and traditional Basque and Navarrese instruments including the txistu and gaita. The saint the city promised to honor forever is still, every year, honored exactly that way.
The date is not incidental to anyone who already knows San Fermín’s calendar. Pamplona’s fiesta runs July 6 to 14. Tudela’s opens July 24. That gap is exactly ten days, a window that leaves the Ribera’s own festival as the closest thing in Navarra to a second San Fermín, on the calendar, in spirit, and, as it turns out, in its own bull run.
Tudela Runs Its Own Encierro, and the Route Looks Nothing Like Pamplona’s
This is the part that surprises people who assume the encierro is a Pamplona-only institution: Tudela runs its own, every single morning from July 25 through July 30, six runs in six days, launched by rocket at 8:00 AM, the same start time as San Fermín’s.
The route is not a smaller version of Estafeta and La Curva. It is its own path entirely: from the corrals, the bulls run along Calle Frauca, up the Cuesta de la Estación, along Camino Caritat and Baquero Jacoste, out onto Avenida de Zaragoza, and into Tudela’s own Plaza de Toros. Nothing about that sequence overlaps with Pamplona’s 848.6-meter run down Santo Domingo and Estafeta. It is a genuinely separate tradition that happens to share a name and a structure, not an imitation built for visitors.
After the animals reach the bullring, vaquillas, young cows with protected horns, are released for the crowd and for recortadores, the same category of event that follows Pamplona’s own morning run. It is worth being precise about what that means and does not mean: this is the same allowed tradition of encierro and vaquillas found in Pamplona, not the separate afternoon taurine spectacle the city also stages during fiesta week, which sits outside what this site covers.
Local press treats Tudela’s encierro as a genuine, live event with real stakes, not a staged curiosity. Regional papers cover each morning’s run individually, sometimes reporting a clean, fast run and sometimes reporting a fall or a goring in the callejón, the same range of outcomes that defines any real encierro. What Tudela’s run has never had is San Fermín’s international profile, which is precisely why it stays almost entirely off the radar of visitors who fly in only for July 6 to 14 and leave before the Ribera’s own fiesta even begins.
La Gigantada: When Navarra’s Giants All Show Up in One City
If Tudela’s encierro is the tradition most visitors miss, La Gigantada is the one they would find genuinely striking if they knew to look for it. Every July 26, Santa Ana’s own feast day, giant-and-bighead troupes from across Navarra converge on Tudela for a single gathering, organized since 1974 by the city’s Orden del Volatín. The Gran Enciclopedia de Navarra records one edition in 1986 drawing 49 figures from roughly twenty different towns, a scale no single town’s own comparsa could stage alone.
Tudela’s own giants have a documented history stretching back further than Pamplona’s. Municipal account books show a payment of twelve ducados in 1614 to a Tudela silversmith, Felipe Terrén, for carving the city’s first cabezotas, oversized papier-mâché heads mounted on wooden frames, along with an early Tarasca figure called the Aytacharco, all built for the Corpus Christi processions of the period. That is roughly two and a half centuries before Pamplona commissioned Tadeo Amorena’s now-famous Gigantes in 1860, and Pamplona’s own Cabezudos have their own separate, later origin story worth knowing if you assume the two cities’ comic figures were carved by the same hands.
The figures that march through Tudela today are not the 1614 originals. The modern municipal comparsa was refounded on January 6, 1986, when the city welcomed two new giants, Sancho VII el Fuerte and Juan de Labrit, funded through joint contributions from more than fifteen Navarrese comparsas rather than the city treasury alone. The town council commissioned two queens the same year to complete the set. Beyond the town’s own established troupe, Tudela’s Barrio de Lourdes neighborhood maintains its own separate comparsa, born in 1975 when a local artisan’s decorative shop-window heads were repurposed into a troupe so schoolchildren could learn to dance them. That neighborhood comparsa has since grown into one of the largest giant-and-bighead collections in Navarra, meaning Santa Ana week now supports more than one distinct giant-and-bighead tradition inside a single city.
La Revoltosa: The Dance With No Fixed Steps
Every fiesta in this region has a signature ritual that outsiders cannot quite replicate by watching a video, and in Tudela that ritual is La Revoltosa. It began, as far as anyone can trace it, as something entirely unplanned: in the early twentieth century, young people in Plaza de los Fueros simply started dancing around the town bandstand while the municipal band played, with no choreography and no fixed occasion behind it.
That informal habit eventually got a fixed musical form. Luis Gil Lasheras, who directed Tudela’s municipal band from 1922 to 1945, composed the definitive arrangement, a blend of jotas, pasodobles, and pasacalles, and it premiered at the 1941 Santa Ana fiestas. The dance itself runs about thirty minutes, alternating between slow and fast passages, with dancers free to interpret each rhythm however they choose rather than following set steps.
For decades, the direction of the circling dance actually reversed with every change in tempo, producing the tangle, the revoltijo, that gives the tradition its name. That reversal was dropped sometime in the 1980s after one too many falls and collisions among the dancers, so today’s version keeps the same music and the same freedom of movement but runs in a single direction throughout. It remains, along with the Gigantada, one of the two fixed points locals point to when asked what actually defines Santa Ana week, apart from the run itself.
What This Means If You Are Already Planning Around San Fermín
None of this is a suggestion to treat Tudela as San Fermín’s understudy. It is a genuinely separate five-century-old tradition, built around its own saint, its own vow, and its own version of the encierro, and it deserves to be understood on those terms rather than as an extension of Pamplona’s calendar. But for anyone already in Navarra for San Fermín and wondering what the region does once Pamplona’s fiesta closes, the practical answer is straightforward: Tudela, the capital of the Ribera and Navarra’s second-largest city, sits roughly 94 kilometers, about an hour’s drive, south of Pamplona, and its own fiesta begins exactly ten days after San Fermín’s ends. The Fiestas de Tudela are also called, in the local pattern common across Navarra’s smaller festivals, simply “las fiestas de Santa Ana” by residents of the city itself. Tudela’s identity outside fiesta week runs just as deep: it is the hometown of architect Rafael Moneo, and it is also the source of a DO-protected vegetable that most of Spain gets wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions
When are the Fiestas de Tudela?
The Fiestas de Tudela, in honor of Santa Ana, run every year from July 24 to July 30, opening with a rocket from Plaza de los Fueros at noon on the 24th and closing at midnight on the 30th.
Does Tudela have its own encierro?
Yes. Tudela runs its own bull run every morning from July 25 to July 30, starting at 8:00 AM on a route entirely separate from Pamplona’s, ending with vaquillas released in Tudela’s own Plaza de Toros.
How far is Tudela from Pamplona?
Tudela is approximately 94 kilometers south of Pamplona, roughly an hour’s drive, and is Navarra’s second-largest municipality and the capital of the Ribera region.
Why is Santa Ana the patron saint of Tudela?
The city council named Santa Ana as patroness in 1530 after making a perpetual vow to honor her every year if she freed Tudela from a plague epidemic. A 1531 letter to the viceroy of Navarra confirms she formally replaced San Pedro Ad-Víncula as the city’s patron.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.