Every summary of the history of Pamplona tells the same smooth story: Romans, a medieval kingdom, a fortress, Hemingway, bulls. It reads like one city aging gracefully for 2,100 years. That is not what happened. Pamplona was unmade and started over at least four times. A Roman general built his camp over a town that already existed. A king had to merge three walled cities that were at war with each other before there could be one Pamplona at all. A conquest then froze the city inside a ring of stone for four centuries. And the Pamplona you can actually walk today only became possible in 1915, when the city won permission to tear a hole in its own walls.
The four foundings matter because they are the only honest answer to questions visitors ask constantly. Why does the Casco Viejo have three grand churches a few hundred meters apart? Because they were the defensive bastions of three separate towns. Why do the old buildings stand so tall for their era? Because a fortress city that cannot spread outward grows upward. Why do street signs carry two names, Pamplona and Iruña? Because the Basque name predates the Roman one, and both survived every remaking. Treat the city as one continuous story and none of this makes sense.
What follows draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own historical account, the documented record of the 1423 Privilegio de la Unión, and the archaeological work that has redrawn the map of Roman Pompaelo since 2001. Where historians disagree, we say so.
The first founding: a Roman camp on top of a town that was already there
The conventional date for the founding of Pamplona is the winter of 75 to 74 BC, when the Roman general Pompey, campaigning against Sertorius in Hispania, established a settlement that took his name: Pompaelo. The date is real, but the word founding oversells it. Pompey did not build on empty ground. A Vascon town already stood here, and its Basque name, Iruña, simply means the city. Pamplona has carried both names ever since, which is why they share space on the street signs today. We cover the archaeology of this first city in depth in our article on Roman Pompaelo and the town beneath it.
Roman Pompaelo turned out to be far more ambitious than scholars long assumed. Rescue excavations under the Plaza del Castillo between 2001 and 2004, triggered by the construction of an underground car park, uncovered a first-century public bath complex that specialists rank among the most important known in the Roman north of the Iberian Peninsula. The finds proved the Roman city extended well beyond its assumed core under today’s Navarrería quarter.
The first city ended the way many Roman cities did, slowly and then suddenly. Visigoths displaced Roman authority in the 4th century and never established good relations with the Vascones. Muslim forces held the area in the 8th century. Then came the blow that closed the era: in 778, the army of Charlemagne, retreating from a failed expedition against Zaragoza, dismantled Pamplona’s walls to keep the city from rebelling. Days later, Vascon fighters destroyed his rearguard at Roncesvalles, the defeat immortalized in the Song of Roland. A city without walls, on a frontier between empires, had effectively been unmade.
The capital of a kingdom, and the problem of three cities
Out of that vacuum came something new. By 824 the local aristocracy had produced a king, Íñigo Arista, and a Kingdom of Pamplona that would grow, under the dynasty founded by Sancho Garcés I in 905, into the medieval Kingdom of Navarre. Under Sancho III el Mayor, who ruled from around 1004 to 1035, Pamplona was the seat of the most powerful Christian monarch in the Iberian Peninsula. The kingdom’s full arc, from its birth in 824 to its legal end in 1841, is a story of its own, and we tell it in our history of the Kingdom of Navarra.
But here is the fact that flat timelines bury: for roughly three centuries, the capital of that kingdom was not one city. It was three.
The Navarrería, on the site of the Roman core, held the native Navarrese population, farmers whose common language was Basque. The Camino de Santiago then brought waves of Frankish settlers, craftsmen and merchants speaking Occitan, who built the borough of San Cernin, formally recognized with its own fuero in 1129 by Alfonso the Battler. A third community, San Nicolás, grew beside it, mixing Navarrese and foreign settlers. Each borough was completely walled. Each had its own government and privileges. Their churches were built as defensive bastions, which is exactly what they look like today. The walls did not face outward against a foreign enemy. They faced each other.
The rivalry was not decorative. In 1276, in the War of the Navarrería, San Cernin and San Nicolás joined forces with French troops and razed the Navarrería to the ground. The oldest quarter of the capital lay nearly abandoned for half a century.
The second founding: 8 September 1423
The man who ended it was Carlos III el Noble, one of the few genuinely beloved kings in Navarrese memory. On 8 September 1423 he enacted the Privilegio de la Unión, dissolving the three borough governments and declaring, in the words the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona still quotes, a single university, a municipal district and indivisible community. The internal walls came down. The new city hall was deliberately built on the no-man’s-land where the three boroughs met, which is why the Casa Consistorial stands exactly where it does, on the square the encierro crosses every July morning.
This was a founding in the fullest sense. Before 1423 there was no single Pamplona to have a history. The document that created the city survives in the municipal archive.
The unified city’s independence lasted less than a century. In July 1512 an army of more than 18,000 men under the Duke of Alba entered the kingdom, and Pamplona surrendered within a week. The formal annexation of Navarre to Castile followed at the Cortes of Burgos in 1515. The Navarrese did not accept it quietly. Reconquest attempts came in 1512, 1516 and 1521, and in the last of these, a rebellion retook Pamplona and besieged the Castilian garrison in the castle. Among the wounded defenders was a Gipuzkoan captain named Íñigo López de Loyola, whose shattered leg and long convalescence turned him toward religion. The world knows him as Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. The Navarrese cause died weeks later at the Battle of Noáin on 30 June 1521.
The third founding: the fortress that froze the city
What Castile won, Castile intended to keep. Pamplona sat within striking distance of France, and under Philip II the city was systematically converted into the strongest fortress town of Spain’s northern frontier. The centerpiece was the Ciudadela, the star-shaped citadel begun in 1571 to the designs of the military engineer Giacomo Palearo. Around the city itself rose the Renaissance walls that still wrap the northern half of the Casco Viejo.
This third remaking gave Pamplona its golden age and its cage in the same gesture. The 18th century brought cobbled streets, sewers, street lighting, the Noáin aqueduct designed by Ventura Rodríguez, and the Neoclassical fountains of Luis Paret y Alcázar. Returning emigrants from America, the indianos, built handsome residences. But a fortress city cannot grow. For four centuries, every new generation of Pamploneses had to fit inside the same stone perimeter, and the city compensated the only way it could, by building upward. The unusually tall old buildings of the Casco Viejo are the fortress era made visible. The full story of that stone corset, including the sieges of the Napoleonic years from 1808 to 1813 and the Carlist Wars, is told in our article on Pamplona’s city walls.
By the late 19th century the pressure was unbearable. Pamplona was overcrowded and unhealthy, and the demolition in 1888 of two inner bastions of the Ciudadela bought space for a first expansion of exactly six blocks, the Primer Ensanche. It was nowhere near enough.
The fourth founding: 1915, the year the modern city became possible
The decisive act of modern Pamplona’s birth was administrative, not architectural: in 1915 the demolition of the wall section known as the Front of La Tejería was finally approved. Through that gap the city poured southward into the Segundo Ensanche, the grid of streets where much of Pamplona’s daily life now happens. Everything about the modern city dates from this opening: the population growth to today’s roughly 203,000 residents, around 350,000 with the metropolitan area, the industrial belt of automotive, pharmaceutical and renewable energy plants, and the two universities founded in the 1950s and 1980s. That same expanding city gave itself a football club within five years of the wall coming down: CA Osasuna, founded in 1920 and, remarkably, still one of only four clubs left in Spanish professional football owned outright by its own members, a story told in full in CA Osasuna’s history.
The 19th century that led up to it had already remade the city’s identity. Navarre ceased to be a kingdom in 1841 and became a province. The railway arrived in 1860. And a walled provincial capital produced, improbably, two international stars: the tenor Julián Gayarre from the Roncal valley, and the violinist Pablo Sarasate, who conquered Europe’s concert halls and came home to Pamplona every July. When the Gamazada movement rose in 1893 to defend Navarre’s fueros, the city built the Monument to the Fueros by popular subscription, a statement in bronze and stone that the province remembered being a kingdom.
Here is the useful way to hold all of this: the fiesta a million visitors attend each July runs through all four cities at once. The bulls are released beside the archive that guards the kingdom’s documents, climb through the borough that was razed in 1276, pass the city hall built on the no-man’s-land of 1423, and finish inside a bullring standing on ground the walls once forbade anyone to build on. The history of Pamplona is not background to the encierro. It is the course.
FAQ
Who founded Pamplona and when?
The Roman general Pompey established Pompaelo in the winter of 75 to 74 BC during his campaign against Sertorius, and the city takes its name from him. But he built on the site of an existing Vascon town whose Basque name, Iruña, means the city. So the honest answer is double: the settlement is older than Rome, and the name Pamplona is Roman.
Why does Pamplona have two names, Pamplona and Iruña?
Pamplona descends from Pompaelo, the name of Pompey’s Roman foundation. Iruña, also written Iruñea, is the Basque name and refers to the town that existed before the Romans arrived. Both names are in current use, appear together on signage, and are equally correct.
When did Pamplona become part of Spain?
Castilian troops under the Duke of Alba took Pamplona in July 1512, and the Kingdom of Navarre was formally annexed to Castile at the Cortes of Burgos in 1515. Navarrese institutions survived that conquest for a long time afterward. Navarre kept the formal status of a kingdom, with its own fueros, until the law of 1841 converted it into a province.
Why was medieval Pamplona three separate cities?
Because it was settled by three distinct populations that refused to mix. Native Basque-speaking Navarrese held the Navarrería, Occitan-speaking Frankish merchants who arrived via the Camino de Santiago built San Cernin from 1129, and a mixed population formed San Nicolás. Each borough had its own walls, government and defensive churches, and they fought openly until Carlos III el Noble merged them by decree with the Privilegio de la Unión on 8 September 1423.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.