Every account of Calle Santo Domingo in Pamplona describes the same three facts: 280 meters long, a grade of up to 10 percent, and the first and fastest stretch of the encierro. What almost none of them mention is the small glass fronted niche built into the old city wall partway up the slope, where runners kneel and sing every morning before the gates open. Visitors who see it assume it has always been there, a fixed piece of a centuries old fiesta. It has not. The shrine and the chant sung in front of it took shape gradually, across nearly twenty years, and the people who built it are named in Pamplona’s own municipal records.
That gap matters because it changes what the ritual actually is. A tradition assumed to be ancient asks for reverence and nothing else. A tradition documented, piece by piece, from a specific morning in 1962 to a specific renovation in 1981, shows something more useful: that San Fermín’s most sincere looking rituals are not handed down from some unrecorded past. They are built by ordinary people, in living memory, and the fiesta absorbs them permanently once enough mornings have passed.
This account draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published history of the niche, the festival’s dedicated historical pages, and Navarra’s regional press coverage of the man credited with starting the chant, cross checked against each other for the dates and names that follow.
The Corrals at the Bottom of the Slope
Before any of the devotional history, Calle Santo Domingo is a functional space. The corrales de Santo Domingo, built into an old bastion of the city’s defensive wall at the foot of the slope, are where the bulls spend their final hours before each morning’s run. That bastion, the Baluarte de Parma, predates the corrals by roughly three centuries; its military history and 2022 restoration are covered in full here. Getting them there is its own quiet tradition: the night before every encierro, the bulls are walked in silence from the Corrales del Gas in the Rochapea neighborhood (built in 1889 on the site of a former gas factory, and used to house bulls since 1899) to the Santo Domingo corrals, a transfer known as the encierrillo. No crowds, no singing, just herders and animals moving through a sleeping city. For the mechanics of what happens once the gates open the next morning, from the exact incline to where the bulls gain speed, the dedicated breakdown of Santo Domingo’s role in the run covers that ground in full.
July 10, 1962: A Morning With No Niche to Kneel In
The chant that now defines the street began before the street had anywhere formal to direct it. According to the festival’s own historical account, a Pamplona local named Jesús Ilundáin Zaragüeta, known to the city as “El Tuli,” knelt in front of the bull corral gates on July 10, 1962, alongside a friend, and began singing a homemade prayer asking San Fermín to guide the runners and grant his blessing. There was no niche and no image to sing to that year. They knelt facing the closed corral itself. El Tuli was, at the time, a young man in his early thirties. He would go on to serve as president of peña Los de Bronce in the 1970s, and he remained a fixture of Pamplona’s fiesta until his death in December 2024, at 93.
The lyrics are credited to Joaquín Zabalza, a member of the musical group Los Iruñako, with music composed by Maestro Turrillas. Regional press coverage of El Tuli’s history adds one honest wrinkle: in later interviews, he himself said the singing may actually have started a few years earlier, around 1959, not 1962. Pamplona’s own festival history keeps 1962 as the reference date, and notes the discrepancy rather than papering over it, which is a level of documentation most invented traditions never get.
From a Hospital Window to a Hole in the City Wall
The image of the saint came later, and it did not start on the street at all. In 1970, a devotional image of San Fermín was placed in a window of the Hospital Militar, a military hospital that once stood on Calle Santo Domingo. That building is gone today. Its site is now occupied by Pamplona’s Department of Education. This is a different historic hospital from the one visitors usually associate with the street: the Museo de Navarra, further up the slope, occupies the former Hospital de Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia, a distinct 16th century building with a 1556 Renaissance façade. Neither building is the hospital that treats today’s gored runners, which has its own separate history. Two different vanished or repurposed hospitals, on the same 280 meters of pavement.
The image itself changed too. In September 1978, during that year’s fiesta, the window image was replaced with the one still used today, which belongs collectively to the city’s peñas and is kept in a private home for the rest of the year. Only in 1981 did the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona give the ritual a permanent home, cutting a niche directly into the stone of the old city wall on the Cuesta de Santo Domingo. What looks like a single, ancient shrine is really three separate decisions made eleven years apart, by three different sets of people.
The Ritual Today: Three Times, Two Languages
The modern version is precise almost to the second. Every morning of the encierro, from July 7 to 14, runners gather at the niche and sing the chant three times, at 7:55, 7:57, and 7:59, first in Spanish and then, since 2009, in Euskara: “Entzun arren San Fermín zu zaitugu patroi zuzendu gure oinak entzierro hontan otoi.” The Spanish original reads: “A San Fermín pedimos, por ser nuestro patrón, nos guíe en el encierro dándonos su bendición,” asking the saint to guide the runners and bless them before the gates open. A year round replica occupies the niche for the other 358 days; each July 7 it is swapped for the original, and on July 15 the glass door is remounted and the everyday replica goes back in its place. Runners who finish the chant and start moving toward the corral gates are heading into the same plaza where the street empties out at the Ayuntamiento, Pamplona’s city hall, whose own stretch of the route picks up the moment Santo Domingo ends.
The Street Beyond the Shrine
None of this is the whole of Calle Santo Domingo. The street is also home to the Mercado de Santo Domingo, rebuilt in 1876 after fire destroyed its predecessor on the same site, and to Casa Marceliano, the tavern Ernest Hemingway favored on the street once known simply as Mercado. Those are their own stories, told in full elsewhere. What the shrine adds to the picture is the reminder that Calle Santo Domingo’s identity was never fixed at any single moment: not its market, not its hospitals, and not its most solemn looking ritual. All of it was built, revised, and rebuilt by people whose names are still on record.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the shrine on Calle Santo Domingo?
It is a hornacina, a small niche built into the old city wall partway up the slope, holding an image of San Fermín. Runners gather in front of it every morning of the encierro to sing a chant asking the saint for protection before the bulls are released.
When did the San Fermín prayer chant start?
Pamplona’s festival history dates the first singing to July 10, 1962, led by a local named Jesús Ilundáin Zaragüeta, though he himself later said it may have begun closer to 1959.
What time do runners sing before the encierro?
The chant is sung three times each morning of the run, at 7:55, 7:57, and 7:59, first in Spanish and then in Basque.
Is the image in the niche the original from the 1970s?
Only during fiesta week. The image used today has belonged to the city’s peñas since 1978 and is kept privately the rest of the year; a replica sits in the niche year round and is swapped out each July 7 through 14.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.