Almost every visitor who circles Pamplona’s ramparts calls them the city’s medieval walls. Almost nothing you can touch up there is medieval. The five kilometer circuit that survives today is a Renaissance and Baroque artillery fortress, designed by the same school of Italian and Flemish engineers who fortified Antwerp and Turin, and it was still a working military installation into the twentieth century. The history of Pamplona’s city walls is not a story about knights. It is a story about cannon, about a border, and about a city that was finally allowed to breathe in 1915.
Getting this wrong costs you the entire plot. If the walls are just generic medieval scenery, then Pamplona is just another pretty old town. Understood correctly, the city walls of Pamplona explain nearly everything distinctive about the place: why the old city is so dense and vertical, why the streets are narrow enough to funnel a herd of bulls, why there is a massive pentagonal citadel attached to a green belt where the fireworks are fired every July, and why the modern grid of the Ensanche begins so abruptly where the stone stops.
This article is built on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published history of the fortifications, the text of the 1939 ministerial order that protected them, coverage of the demolition centennial in the Navarran press, and the citation of the Europa Nostra jury that in 2012 judged this one of Europe’s best conserved bastioned enclosures. The dates below are the documented ones, and several of them contradict the postcard version of the story.
Three Walled Towns Came Before One Walled City
Pamplona, Iruña in Basque, began as Pompaelo, the camp the Roman general Pompey established in the winter of 75 to 74 BC over a Vascon town that already existed. Fortification is as old as the city itself. But the medieval chapter that visitors imagine as a single walled town was actually stranger: for centuries Pamplona was three separate fortified burgos, Navarrería, San Cernin, and San Nicolás, each with its own walls, its own church tower doubling as a defensive position, and a record of open warfare against its neighbors across the street.
The three burgos were not decoratively rivalrous. They fought, and their internal walls were built against each other as much as against any outside enemy. Only in 1423, when King Charles III el Noble imposed the Privilege of the Union, did the three become one city, and the internal fortifications gradually lost their purpose. That unified Pamplona inherited a single medieval perimeter. Then, within a century, nearly all of it was made obsolete.
1512 Turned Pamplona Into a Frontier Fortress
The year that actually explains the walls you can walk on is 1512. Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, took Pamplona for Ferdinand the Catholic, and the old Kingdom of Navarre passed into the Crown of Castile. Within months, a Franco-Navarrese army of some 15,000 men besieged the city trying to take it back. The siege failed, but it taught Castile a lesson it never forgot: Pamplona was now the frontier stronghold guarding the western Pyrenees against France, and its medieval walls belonged to a dead era of warfare. In 1513, work began on the fortress of Santiago, the city’s first modern stronghold.
The lesson was reinforced brutally in 1521, when a French-backed force of around 12,000 men took the city while the castle of Santiago held out. Among the wounded defending it was a young gentleman named Ignatius of Loyola, whose shattered leg at Pamplona set him on the path to founding the Jesuit order. French artillery breached the castle walls and forced its surrender, proving again that stone built for the crossbow era could not answer cannon.
From 1542, under Emperor Charles V, the engineer Luis Pizaño rebuilt Pamplona’s defenses for the artillery age: bastions with casemates, sloped and thickened walls, parapets and embrasures, and the systematic demolition of the proud vertical towers that gunpowder had turned into liabilities. The Ayuntamiento’s own history of the walls records that the tower of San Nicolás came down in this campaign, and that the price paid for its demolition equaled the cost of a full set of crimson velvet regalia. The Middle Ages were literally sold off by the square meter.
The Citadel and the Double Ring: Fortification “in the Modern Style”
In 1569 the engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli delivered a blunt report: Pamplona, as fortified, could not be defended. It needed a very major castle. Philip II handed the problem to one of the most respected military engineers in Europe, the Italian Giacomo Palearo, known as El Fratín, who designed a pentagonal citadel in the new bastioned style, explicitly modeled on the fortresses of Turin and Antwerp. Viceroy Vespasiano Gonzaga laid the first stone in 1571, and the work ran for more than thirty years, with the outer defenses considered complete around 1645. The counterguards of Santa Clara and Santa Isabel followed after the engineer Esteban Escudero’s 1685 report.
The final great redesign came in 1726, when Jorge Próspero de Verboom, a disciple of Vauban, delivered a general project for the citadel and the entire city enclosure. Verboom’s plan created a double ring of fortifications on the most exposed fronts, outworks that could be flanked and defended from the main walls, all calculated to slow a besieging army to a crawl. What you walk today on the northern and eastern fronts, from the Redín bastion above the river to the Labrit bastion, is substantially the fortress that this 16th to 18th century lineage of engineers left behind. The full documented chronology is laid out in the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s history of the walls, and it is worth reading precisely because so little of it is medieval.
The Corset Breaks: 1888, 1915, and the Demolition That Built Modern Pamplona
Fortress status came with a price the guidebooks rarely mention. For military reasons Pamplona was forbidden to grow beyond its walls, and by the second half of the nineteenth century the city was suffocating. The population was crammed inside the stone corset, buildings climbed higher, sanitation failed, and epidemics multiplied. The Pamplona city walls history of this period is a public health story: the walls that had protected the city were now slowly strangling it.
Relief came in stages. In 1888 the army permitted the demolition of the citadel’s La Victoria and San Antón bastions, and the modest Primer Ensanche was built on the cleared ground. The real liberation took a national law: on 7 January 1915, the Spanish state authorized the demolition of the southern front, and on 25 July 1915 the first symbolic blows were struck at the San Nicolás front. The heavy demolition ran from 1918 to 1921, removing everything from the citadel to the Labrit bastion. Pamplona’s negotiators had spent fifteen years arguing with the war ministry, and what finally settled the question was the First World War’s demonstration that aircraft could simply fly over any wall ever built.
On the leveled southern front rose the Segundo Ensanche, the orderly grid that still forms Pamplona’s commercial center. This is why the city reads so abruptly in two halves. It also explains something every July visitor notices without knowing why: the old city that the walls corseted for four centuries stayed compact, dense, and narrow, and that preserved street grid is the same tight fabric the encierro runs through each morning of San Fermín. The bulls run where they run partly because the walls never let those streets sprawl.
Walking the Five Kilometers Today
What survived the demolition turned out to be extraordinary. On 25 September 1939 the surviving walled ensemble was declared a national monument, the army handed the citadel to the city in 1964, with the formal transfer in 1966, and the citadel received its own historic monument declaration in 1973. From 2005 the Ayuntamiento, backed by the Institución Príncipe de Viana and Spain’s Ministry of Culture, ran a restoration program ambitious enough that in 2012 the project won a double distinction at the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage, the Europa Nostra Awards: a conservation award and the public choice award, with the jury calling Pamplona one of Europe’s best conserved bastioned enclosures and citadels.
The practical version: the circuit runs more than five kilometers and is free to walk at any hour, with the finest stretches along the northern front at the Redín bastion, looking down on the Arga river and the Camino de Santiago’s entry into the city, and the Media Luna park approach to the Labrit bastion. Redín and Labrit are also the oldest surviving sections of the enclosure. The Fortín de San Bartolomé, a small late 18th century outwork at the end of Media Luna park, houses the Centro de Interpretación de las Fortificaciones, a compact and genuinely well made museum of the whole system; admission is free and it opens on a seasonal schedule published by the Ayuntamiento’s visitor page, so check before you plan around it. Of the city’s six surviving gates, only the Portal de Francia of 1553 keeps its original appearance, drawbridge included.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long are the city walls of Pamplona?
The surviving circuit runs more than five kilometers around the north, east, and west of the old city, plus the pentagonal citadel and its glacis on the south side. It is considered one of the best preserved bastioned fortification systems in Europe, a judgment the Europa Nostra jury endorsed in 2012. Most of the walkable perimeter is open, free, and unfenced.
When were the walls of Pamplona built?
The walls you see today were built and continuously rebuilt between the 16th and 18th centuries, beginning after the Castilian conquest of 1512 and the sieges that followed it. The citadel was begun in 1571 to a design by Giacomo Palearo for Philip II, and the final double enclosure follows Jorge Próspero de Verboom’s project of 1726. Only fragments and the general trace of the earlier medieval circuit remain.
Why were the walls of Pamplona torn down?
Only the southern front was torn down, and it took a national law of 7 January 1915 to permit it. The walls were a military corset that legally prevented the city from expanding, and by the late 19th century Pamplona suffered severe overcrowding and epidemics. Demolition began symbolically on 25 July 1915, the heavy work ran from 1918 to 1921, and the Segundo Ensanche district was built on the cleared ground.
Can you visit the walls of Pamplona for free?
Yes. The wall walk itself is public, free, and open at all hours, including the citadel park during its opening times. The Fortín de San Bartolomé interpretation center at Media Luna park is also free, though it opens seasonally, so confirm current hours on the Ayuntamiento’s page before visiting.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.