Pamplona is often described as a walled city with six historic gates, and every one of those gates gets photographed as though it belongs to the medieval town. None of them do. The old city gates of Pamplona that visitors walk through today, from the Portal de Francia at the Redín viewpoint to the reassembled arches inside the Taconera Gardens, all date from the 16th to the 18th century. They were built only after Pamplona’s real medieval gates were shut and torn down.
That distinction is not trivia. It changes what a visitor is actually looking at. A gate built in 1553 to withstand cannon fire, with sloped walls and angled entry designed by military engineers, is a different kind of object than a gate built for a medieval town defended by pikes and archers. Treating the six surviving and vanished portals as generic “old gates” flattens a specific, documented turning point in the city’s history: the moment Pamplona stopped being three separate walled boroughs and became a single artillery-age fortress.
This account draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own tourism and heritage records, including its published history of the walls and individual entries for each surviving gate, cross-checked against independent Spanish heritage databases for construction and demolition dates.
The Medieval City These Gates Replaced
Before any of the six gates described below existed, Pamplona was not one walled city but three: Navarrería, San Cernin, and San Nicolás, each a separate fortified borough with its own walls and its own gates, often hostile to one another. That changed in 1423, when the Privilege of the Union merged the three boroughs into a single city under one government. The medieval walls that had separated them from each other became internal and, within a few generations, irrelevant to the city’s actual defense.
The real break came in 1512, when a Castilian army under Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, conquered Pamplona for the crown of Ferdinand the Catholic. A Franco-Navarrese counterattack the same year failed to retake the city but exposed how outdated its defenses were. Construction began almost immediately on a new fortress system built to resist artillery rather than scaling ladders. By 1542, under the Duke of Alba and the military engineer Luis Pizaño, the rebuilding had turned aggressive: old medieval towers were demolished outright, walls were thickened and sloped, and, according to the city’s own published history, existing gateways were closed. The medieval gates of Navarrería, San Cernin, and San Nicolás were not preserved, restored, or absorbed into the new system. They were retired.
Everything that followed, including all six gates covered here, belongs to that replacement system: the bastioned, artillery-resistant wall that took its final form with the construction of the pentagonal Citadel, designed from 1571 by the Italian military engineer Giacomo Palearo, known as El Fratín. The wall visible in Pamplona today, of which roughly three-quarters survives and which has been declared a National Monument, is a 16th-to-18th-century military project layered on top of a medieval city whose own gates are gone entirely. Visitors who walk the Old City encierro route street by street are, without realizing it, walking the footprint of that same replacement city.
Portal de Francia: The One Gate Still Standing Where It Started
Of the six historic gates, only the Portal de Francia, also called the Portal de Zumalacárregui, still occupies its original location. Built in 1553 on the order of the Viceroy, Duke of Albuquerque, it stands at the Paseo del Redín, beneath the Redín bastion, on the site of an earlier medieval gate that served the Navarrería borough before the 1553 rebuild replaced it. The inner of its two main doorways still carries a carved Renaissance coat of arms bearing the double-headed eagle and imperial arms of Charles V.
The name comes from its historic function: travelers arriving from France, including pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago into the city after crossing the Puente de la Magdalena, entered and exited through this gate for centuries. Its second name, Zumalacárregui, was added in 1939 to commemorate a plaque marking the 1833 departure of General Tomás Zumalacárregui from Pamplona at the head of Carlist troops. A lower secondary entrance with a drawbridge, added roughly two centuries after the original 1553 gate, remained in working use until 1915. That drawbridge is still lowered once a year, every January 5, for the arrival of the Three Wise Men ahead of Epiphany.
Two Gates That Became Garden Ornaments
Not every surviving gate is still where it was built. The Portal de la Taconera, constructed in 1666 on the western flank of the walls in the style of a Roman triumphal arch, was dismantled entirely in 1906 to make way for the street widening that came with Pamplona’s first Ensanche, or urban expansion. Its stones sat in a municipal warehouse for roughly 97 years before the city reassembled and restored the gate in 2002, placing it inside the Taconera Gardens, where it now functions purely as a decorative arch rather than a working entrance.
The San Nicolás Gate had a nearly identical fate. Built in 1660 under Viceroy Francisco Tutavilla on the southern flank of the walls, its original location, it was likewise dismantled when the walls were cleared for urban expansion and rebuilt in 1929 at its current site on Calle Bosquecillo, near the Taconera Gardens. It carries the coat of arms of the last Habsburg monarch at its center, flanked by the arms of Viceroy San Germán, along with two badly weathered 17th-century shields whose exact origin is no longer certain. Both gates today read less as fortifications and more as garden follies, which is a fair description of what they have actually become. Their triumphal-arch styling was always more ceremonial than defensive, which is likely why the city chose to preserve them by relocation rather than let them disappear the way two of the other four gates did.
The Two Gates That No Longer Exist at All
Two of Pamplona’s six historic gates are gone completely, with nothing left to visit. The Rochapea Gate, built in 1553 by the same Duke of Albuquerque who commissioned the Portal de Francia, had two separate doors: an inner door closed by a portcullis and an 18th-century outer door fitted with a drawbridge. Both were demolished in 1914 to widen the entrance at the base of Cuesta de Santo Domingo, the steepest section of the encierro route, where the run begins each morning of San Fermín. The gate’s imperial coat of arms was salvaged and relocated in 1960 to a tower of the rebuilt Portal Nuevo, where it can still be seen. In 2022, restoration work at the site partially uncovered remnants of the gate’s outer door, more than a century after it was torn down.
The Portal de Tejería fared worse. Opened in 1640 at the southeastern angle of the walls, between the Labrit bastion and the San Bartolomé fort, it was demolished between 1918 and 1921 under a 1915 law that authorized clearing the walls along the San Nicolás and Tejería fronts to make room for Pamplona’s second Ensanche. Unlike the Rochapea site, nothing of the Tejería gate itself has resurfaced. The only trace that survives is the coat of arms of its builder, the Viceroy and Count of Oropesa, which was preserved and can now be seen mounted on a gate of the Citadel facing Avenida del Ejército. The gate’s physical location today is marked only by the street layout and old maps, not by any visible structure.
Portal Nuevo and What There Is to See Today
The sixth gate, Portal Nuevo, was opened progressively from 1571 as part of the same building campaign that produced the Citadel, connecting the Paseo de Ronda to what is now the Taconera Gardens. Navarre’s first railway line once passed beneath its arch, and today the Cuesta de la Estación still runs through it. The original bridge structure was destroyed in 1823 during an Absolutist attack and stood unrepaired for well over a century until it was rebuilt in the mid-20th century to a design by the Pamplona architect Víctor Eusa.
Taken together, the six gates were never purely military checkpoints. Local taxes on food, drink, and fuel brought into the city from outside the walls were historically collected at the gatehouses, making them customs posts as much as defensive structures. Of the six, a visitor today can walk through or past Portal de Francia and Portal Nuevo essentially where the 16th-century builders left them, see the Taconera and San Nicolás gates as relocated garden arches, and find nothing at all standing at the old Rochapea or Tejería sites beyond a coat of arms moved elsewhere and a stretch of ongoing archaeological interest. The walls connecting all of it, largely intact and formally protected, remain one of the best-preserved artillery-era fortification systems in Spain, and the park that traces their outer edge, Vuelta del Castillo, is the easiest way to see how much of the fortress actually survives in one walk.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many gates did the walled city of Pamplona have?
Six, all built between the 16th and 18th centuries as part of the artillery-resistant wall system that replaced Pamplona’s earlier medieval defenses: Portal de Francia, Rochapea Gate, Portal Nuevo, Portal de la Taconera, San Nicolás Gate, and Portal de Tejería.
Which of Pamplona’s gates is the oldest and still in its original spot?
The Portal de Francia, built in 1553, is the only one of the six still standing at its original location, on the Paseo del Redín beneath the Redín bastion.
Are any of Pamplona’s old city gates actually medieval?
No. All six date from the 16th to 18th centuries. Pamplona’s genuine medieval gates, which belonged to its three separate walled boroughs before their 1423 union, were closed and demolished starting in the 1540s and no longer exist.
Can you still walk through Pamplona’s historic gates today?
Two of them, Portal de Francia and Portal Nuevo, still function as passages roughly where they were built. The Taconera and San Nicolás gates were dismantled and rebuilt as ornamental arches inside the Taconera Gardens. The Rochapea and Tejería gates no longer physically exist.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.