Every July, camera phones fill Plaza del Castillo the moment the fiesta’s opening rocket goes off, on the assumption that this is where San Fermín actually starts. It isn’t, not anymore. The chupinazo, the noon rocket that launches nine days of festivities, has been fired from the balcony of the Ayuntamiento two blocks away since 1941. Before that, according to Pamplona’s own city council, the ceremony belonged to Plaza del Castillo itself.
That handover matters because it explains what this square actually is today, and what it isn’t. Visitors who arrive expecting the ceremonial heart of the festival find instead a 14,000 square meter pedestrian plaza built around cafe terraces, a bandstand, and an ordinary rhythm of morning coffee and evening drinks. The real ceremony happens elsewhere. What Plaza del Castillo held onto instead is stranger and older: a name inherited from a royal castle that no longer exists, a literary history built by a single American novelist’s daily habits, and a buried record, quite literally, of Roman baths and an Islamic burial ground that a parking garage project tore open in 2001.
This account draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own tourism and chupinazo history pages, cross-checked against Pamplona’s heavily footnoted municipal history and the published archaeological record of the 2001 to 2004 excavation beneath the square, including a peer-reviewed study of the necropolis remains. Where sources disagreed on a specific figure, this article uses the more directly sourced number and says so.
A Castle That Gave the Square Its Name, Then Vanished Twice
Plaza del Castillo takes its name from a castle that no longer exists. King Luis Hutín of Navarra, known in France as Louis X, ordered it built around 1310 on the plaza’s eastern edge, using stone hauled from the recently destroyed town of Navarrería along with quarried material from several nearby villages. For most of the 14th century the site doubled as a market and a patch of open ground where the city grew grass and wheat between the walls of Pamplona’s three separate medieval towns.
That first castle didn’t survive Pamplona’s changing defenses. In 1513, Fernando el Católico ordered a second fortress built at the plaza’s southern end, recycling stone from the first. It lasted less than a century. Once the star-shaped Ciudadela went up at the end of the 1500s as the city’s new military anchor, this second castle lost its purpose and came down, replaced around 1600 by a Carmelite convent that closed the plaza’s south side for the next two centuries. The square’s Basque name, Gazteluko Plaza, preserves the same idea in a different language: gaztelu means castle.
At almost 14,000 square meters, Plaza del Castillo is Pamplona’s second largest plaza today, behind only Plaza de los Fueros. It didn’t take its current shape until the 17th and 18th centuries, when the open, undeveloped land was gradually built up with houses and civic buildings, a process the city undertook without much prior precedent for organizing a space this size. What stands around it now reflects that piecemeal construction: an arcaded square with a facade of the Palacio de Navarra on its south side, the former Casino building to the north, and the Baroque Palacio de Goyeneche on its eastern edge, none of them built to match, because none of them were planned together.
Where San Fermín Actually Began, Until 1941
The earliest documented request to fire an opening rocket over Pamplona on July 6th comes from 1931, when a tobacconist named Juan Etxepare asked the city council for permission to launch fireworks from the street at noon. For years afterward, according to the Ayuntamiento’s own account, the ceremony that grew out of that request was heralded from Plaza del Castillo, not from the Casa Consistorial. The move to the town hall balcony, where the chupinazo happens today, only dates to 1941.
That is a smaller shift in geography than most visitors assume, roughly two blocks, but it is why the two squares get confused. Pamplona’s official listing for the ceremony is unambiguous about where it happens now: the Plaza Consistorial, in front of the town hall, fills to its full 2,502 square meters by late morning on July 6th, and giant screens go up in Paseo de Sarasate, Plaza de los Fueros, and Antoniutti Park for the overflow crowd that can’t fit. Plaza del Castillo plays no ceremonial role in that moment anymore. Its relationship to the festival today is a supporting one: a place people pass through, gather in, and drink in before and after the ceremony happens somewhere else, not the stage itself.
Hemingway’s Actual Circuit Through the Square
Ernest Hemingway’s first steps in Pamplona happened here. He arrived with his wife Hadley Richardson on July 6, 1923, and by his own account and the Ayuntamiento’s, made Plaza del Castillo his base for every visit that followed. Café Iruña, still open on the square today, became the meeting point for the characters of The Sun Also Rises, published as Fiesta in Spanish editions. The novel’s own description of arriving at the square, hot, green-treed, flags on their staffs, and cool “under the shade of the arcade that runs all the way around,” matches the arcaded plaza that still stands.
Several of the other locations in Hemingway’s Pamplona have not survived. The Hotel Quintana and Café Suizo, both real establishments he frequented, are gone. Bar Torino, fictionalized in the novel as “Bar Milano,” and a later haunt called Café Kutz that Hemingway still visited as late as 1953, are also closed. What remains is Hotel La Perla, built in 1859 on the plaza’s northeast corner and still Navarra’s oldest operating hotel, and Café Iruña itself, which has occupied the same spot on the square since the late 19th century.
What a Parking Garage Dug Up in 2001
Between 2001 and 2003, Pamplona closed Plaza del Castillo to traffic, pedestrianized it, and began building an underground parking structure beneath it. The excavation that followed, running from July 2001 into early 2004, turned up one of the richest archaeological sites in the city’s history: remains of a large Roman bath complex, a stretch of medieval town wall, the foundations of the old Carmelite convent, an undated menhir, and an Islamic burial ground containing more than 200 graves. For the deeper story of Roman Pamplona itself, the baths found here connect to a much older founding history than most visitors assume.
The burial ground turned out to be the more significant find. Radiocarbon dating later confirmed it as the oldest scientifically dated Islamic necropolis on the entire Iberian Peninsula, with burials clustering in the decades immediately following the Arab-Berber conquest of Hispania in 711. Researchers have since described it as one of the oldest and northernmost Islamic burial sites documented anywhere in Europe, evidence of how quickly Muslim administrative presence reached into the Pyrenees.
Discoveries on that scale, directly beneath a plaza the city had already committed to rebuilding, produced a genuine public fight over what to do next. Archaeologists pushed to preserve the Roman baths in place as a visitable underground site; the city ultimately chose to continue the parking project, preserving a portion of the medieval wall within the finished structure while removing most of the rest. Years later, in 2008, reporting confirmed that material excavated from the site and judged to have no further value had been used as construction fill in an unrelated Pamplona neighborhood development. Today, only a fragment of Roman mosaic and a handful of wall blocks remain on public display. Almost everything else that came out of the ground during those three years is gone.
The Kiosk, the Fountain, and Visiting the Square Today
The bandstand at the center of Plaza del Castillo, an 18 meter tall structure topped by a dome on Ionic columns, has stood since June 28, 1943. It replaced a wooden kiosk installed in 1910, which had itself replaced an 18th century fountain by the sculptor Luis Paret. That fountain’s central statue, a female allegorical figure Pamplona nicknamed La Mariblanca, survived the demolition and now stands in the city’s Parque de la Taconera, where it remains today.
Visiting now, the plaza is fully pedestrian, arcaded on all four sides, and lined with cafe terraces that fill from morning coffee through late-night drinks, especially during the nine days of San Fermín, when it becomes one of the most crowded gathering spots in the city even though the festival’s official ceremonies happen elsewhere. A statue of King Carlos III el Noble marks the square’s southern edge, where Avenida Carlos III begins its route toward Pamplona’s newer districts. What looks like a simple postcard square is, underneath the surface in the most literal sense, one of the most excavated and contested pieces of ground in the city.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Plaza del Castillo in Pamplona?
Plaza del Castillo is Pamplona’s second largest public square, covering almost 14,000 square meters in the center of the old city. Named for a royal castle that stood on the site from 1310 until it was demolished centuries ago, it is now a pedestrianized plaza lined with cafes and arcaded buildings, including the historic Café Iruña.
Is Plaza del Castillo where the chupinazo happens?
No. The chupinazo, San Fermín’s opening rocket, has been launched from the balcony of the Ayuntamiento at Plaza Consistorial since 1941. Before that, according to Pamplona’s own city council, the ceremony was held at Plaza del Castillo, which is why the two squares are sometimes confused.
What was found under Plaza del Castillo?
An excavation tied to an underground parking project, conducted between 2001 and 2004, uncovered a large Roman bath complex, a stretch of medieval town wall, the remains of a Carmelite convent, an undated menhir, and an Islamic necropolis of more than 200 graves later confirmed as the oldest scientifically dated Islamic burial ground on the Iberian Peninsula.
Is Plaza del Castillo the same as Plaza Consistorial?
No, they are two different squares about two blocks apart. Plaza Consistorial sits in front of Pamplona’s town hall and is where the chupinazo and the closing Pobre de Mí ceremony happen today. Plaza del Castillo is the larger, older square that held that role until 1941 and is now known for its cafes and arcades.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.