Gran Hotel La Perla in Pamplona keeps a room named for Ernest Hemingway, and that part of the story is true. What is not true, or at least not the whole truth, is the version repeated across most travel writing about the hotel: that Hemingway had one long, unbroken relationship with La Perla from his first trip to Pamplona, and that this is the building behind the fictional Hotel Montoya in The Sun Also Rises. Neither claim survives a look at Pamplona’s own municipal archive. Hemingway was turned away from La Perla on his very first visit. And the hotel that shaped the novel, and hosted him through most of the 1920s, stood at the other end of the same square, run by a different man entirely.
This matters because it changes who gets credit for one of the most famous literary friendships tied to San Fermín. La Perla’s Suite 201 is a genuine, documented piece of Hemingway history, but treating it as the whole story erases Juanito Quintana, the Pamplona hotelier who was Hemingway’s actual friend, his model for a major character, and the man who later confirmed the connection himself in his own handwriting. Visitors who only learn the La Perla version miss the better, stranger story next door.
This account is built from the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own tourism archive, which maintains separate, sourced pages on both hotels and Hemingway’s relationship to each; from Gran Hotel La Perla’s official site and history pages; and from Wikipedia’s sourcing on both the hotel and Juanito Quintana, cross-checked against an academic literary study of the novel and against Hemingway’s own published letters and nonfiction.
The Suite Named for Hemingway Is Real. The Reservation Behind It Wasn’t, at First.
Gran Hotel La Perla opened on June 5, 1881, as the Fonda La Perla, making it the oldest hotel in Pamplona and one of the oldest still operating in Spain. Its first owners were Miguel and Teresa Graz, he a chef, she from Burguete, a village in the Navarrese Pyrenees. The hotel moved a few doors down to its current address at Plaza del Castillo, nº1, within months of opening. During a major cholera epidemic that hit Pamplona in the summer of 1885, La Perla was the only establishment in the city willing to stay open, and it supplied food to the military hospital treating infectious cases. Miguel Graz died of cholera during that same epidemic. Teresa kept the hotel running afterward.
Ernest Hemingway’s first trip to Pamplona was July 6, 1923. He and his party had requested, by telegraph and by letter, two weeks ahead of time, that La Perla reserve two rooms. When they arrived, no rooms had been held. In Hemingway’s own account, published in the Toronto Star Weekly, the hotel offered them “a narrow room with a bed that overlooked the kitchen patio.” After an argument, the owner arranged alternate lodging in a private house that rented rooms that year under an informal arrangement with the hotel, owned by the Ayestarán Bidegain family. Hemingway’s first San Fermín, in other words, did not begin inside La Perla at all.
The following year was different. Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, later told biographer Bernice Kert (in the book The Hemingway Women) that the couple returned to Pamplona on June 26, 1924, this time with a genuine reservation at La Perla. Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein from the hotel that year, describing the festival. That 1924 stay is the real, documented basis for La Perla’s Hemingway connection, and it is the reason Suite 201 exists today, furnished to evoke his era, alongside rooms dedicated to violinist Pablo Sarasate (Suite 207) and the hotel’s own architect, Víctor Eusa. But 1924 was also the year everything changed, because that same trip is when Hemingway met the man who would become far more important to his Pamplona story than any hotel room.
The Hotel That Actually Inspired the Novel Stood at the Other End of the Square
According to the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own account of the Hotel Quintana, a Madrid bullfighting critic named Rafael Hernández had recommended, that same June of 1924, that Hemingway’s circle try the Hotel Quintana instead of La Perla. They took the advice, struck up a friendship with the owner, Juanito Quintana, and spent the closing days of the 1924 festival at his hotel. From 1925 through 1931, Hemingway and his group stayed at Hotel Quintana on every Pamplona visit, not at La Perla. The two buildings sat on the same plaza, a short walk apart: La Perla at Plaza del Castillo nº1, Hotel Quintana at nº18.
Juanito Quintana was born in Pamplona in 1891, the son of a postman. He opened his hotel at 18 Plaza del Castillo and built it into the preferred stop for the bullfighters who came to the city each July, running his hotel alongside a career as a bullfighting entrepreneur. Between 1926 and 1930 he served as president of Pamplona’s Club Taurino. He and Hemingway shared two things that mattered enormously to both of them: a genuine passion for bullfighting, and, according to Wikipedia’s account of his life, Republican political sympathies during Spain’s Second Republic. That friendship, not a hotel reservation, is what actually anchored Hemingway’s Pamplona summers for most of the decade that produced his most famous novel.
None of this is a knock on La Perla’s real history. The hotel’s own guest ledger over the decades reads like a small cultural history of Spain in its own right: Alfonso XII, Alfonso XIII, Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía among the Spanish royals who stayed there, alongside Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, the matador Manolete, tenor Julián Gayarre, painter Ignacio Zuloaga, and, in later decades, Julio Iglesias, Woody Allen, and Mario Vargas Llosa. It is simply that Hemingway’s own name belongs more to the other hotel on the square than La Perla’s marketing tends to suggest.
Quintana Recognized Himself in Print
The clearest evidence that Quintana, not La Perla, inspired the novel’s Hotel Montoya is not a scholarly guess. It is a paper trail Quintana and Hemingway left themselves. In March 1927, six months after The Sun Also Rises (published in some markets as Fiesta) came out, Hemingway asked his publisher to send a copy to “Don Juan Quintana,” addressed simply to “Hotel Quintana, Pamplona.” Quintana wrote back on June 17, 1927: “I really liked the novel. I imagine that the character under the name Montoya must be Juanito Quintana, am I right?” Five years later, in Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway described Quintana in his own nonfiction as “the best aficionado and most loyal friend in Spain, and with a fine hotel with all the rooms full.” A later academic study of the novel, Harry Stoneback’s Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Glossary and Commentary, reaches the same conclusion Wikipedia cites when it notes that La Perla is sometimes mistakenly credited with the Montoya connection. Much of the surviving detail on the Quintana friendship traces back to José María Iribarren, the Navarrese writer whose 1970 book on Hemingway still anchors nearly every serious account of his San Fermín visits.
The friendship was genuine but not always smooth. Smithsonian magazine’s 2025 reporting on the centennial of Hemingway’s most consequential Pamplona trip found that Quintana, in a later interview, remembered Hemingway unflatteringly as “a very strange person” with “a bad character,” and recalled having to warn him after his rowdy circle kept other guests up until 3 a.m., including the young matador Cayetano Ordóñez, the real-life basis for the novel’s Pedro Romero, who was also staying at Hotel Quintana that year. Hemingway’s own reply, “No more, no more, Juanito,” suggests he took the warning to heart.
Hotel Quintana did not survive the decade that followed. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, Juanito Quintana and his wife happened to be away in Mont-de-Marsan, France, watching bullfights, an absence that likely spared him direct repression as a known Republican. His hotel was not so lucky. Francoist authorities seized it, and Quintana never recovered the building. He spent several years in France, in Biarritz, where his brother ran a hotel, before both brothers were allowed back into Spain in 1941 and settled in San Sebastián. When Hemingway returned to Spain after a long absence in the 1950s, Hotel Quintana no longer existed as a business, but Quintana himself, though no longer a hotelier, personally arranged Hemingway’s Pamplona lodging for his 1953 and 1959 visits, and the two men traveled together afterward.
What’s Actually Left to See Today
Gran Hotel La Perla is still open, still a five star hotel, and still the building on Plaza del Castillo with balconies over Calle Estafeta, one of the most sought after private vantage points for watching the encierro pass below. The hotel now has 44 guest rooms plus five attic rooms, and Suite 201, the Hemingway Suite, is furnished to evoke his 1924 stay and can be visited on request even by guests staying elsewhere in the hotel. The building at Plaza del Castillo nº18, once Hotel Quintana, is now an apartment building. Its Art Nouveau facade still stands, per Smithsonian’s 2025 reporting, but that history survives only in the archive and the facade, not in a room you can book. The same reporting places Hemingway’s own most solidly documented La Perla stays in the 1950s, on his return visits in 1953 and 1959, in a room overlooking the bull-running route, which the hotel still preserves and shows to guests today. Readers who want the fuller dispute over exactly which year Hemingway first slept at La Perla, including his grandson John Hemingway’s own skepticism, can find it in this site’s deeper account of the Hemingway hotel record.
For visitors trying to place both stories on the same square, La Perla anchors the northeast corner near Calle Estafeta, while the Quintana address sits further along the plaza toward the Old Town. Both are a short walk from other Hemingway sites already documented on this site, including the writer’s regular table at Café Iruña, on the same square.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Hemingway always stay at Gran Hotel La Perla in Pamplona?
No. His first visit, in 1923, ended in a dispute after La Perla failed to hold his reserved rooms, and he stayed elsewhere that year. He had a genuine, reservation-backed stay at La Perla in 1924, but from 1925 through 1931 his regular Pamplona lodging was Hotel Quintana, a separate hotel on the same plaza.
What hotel actually inspired Hotel Montoya in The Sun Also Rises?
Hotel Quintana, owned by Juanito Quintana, a Pamplona hotelier and bullfighting entrepreneur who became one of Hemingway’s closest Spanish friends. Quintana confirmed the connection himself in a 1927 letter to Hemingway, and Hemingway named him directly, without disguise, in his later nonfiction book Death in the Afternoon.
Is Gran Hotel La Perla still open today?
Yes. It operates as a five star hotel at Plaza del Castillo, nº1, in Pamplona, following a complete renovation in 2007.
Can you actually stay in Hemingway’s room at Gran Hotel La Perla?
Yes. Suite 201 is dedicated to Hemingway and furnished to evoke the period of his stay, and the hotel allows guests to arrange a visit to it on request even without booking that specific suite.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.