Most accounts of Casa Marceliano describe it the same way: Ernest Hemingway’s favorite Pamplona tavern, a “secret hideaway” where he ate and drank after the encierro, now closed. That framing is accurate as far as it goes, and also incomplete in a way that erases the more interesting story. Casa Marceliano did not fade out of business or get remodeled into something else. In 1992, Pamplona’s own City Council bought the building specifically to tear it down, voted formally to demolish it, and then never carried the vote out. The tavern that survived over a century of ownership by one family sat empty for roughly a decade before quietly becoming a municipal office, with no sign left to mark what it had been.
Why this matters to anyone researching Hemingway’s Pamplona: nearly every English-language source treats Casa Marceliano’s closure as a natural end, the way old bars close everywhere. It wasn’t natural. It was a demolition order that stalled, reversed by nobody, simply never executed. The building the City Council once voted to knock down is the same building still standing on Calle del Mercado today.
This account draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published history of the establishment, a Navarra local-history archive citing the Ayuntamiento’s book Comercios Centenarios de Pamplona, and the dedicated Hemingway-in-Pamplona research site hemingway.es, which documents the ownership and closure in more detail than any general travel source.
A Wine Tavern on Calle del Mercado
The first documented record of the business dates to 1886, when a municipal catastral registry lists Marceliano Anoz Orbáiz as the owner of a wine-selling establishment. Municipal recordkeeping in the 1880s was inconsistent enough that historians place the actual opening two or three years earlier, likely around 1883. It began as a straightforward taberna: dim lighting, wooden furniture, local wine, and the kind of clientele a Navarrese chronicler once summarized as “castas de Pamplona de toda la vida,” Pamplona’s own old-timers. Like many tabernas of the period, it evolved into a casa de comidas, a house that served full meals alongside the wine.
In 1919, Marceliano’s son Matías Anoz Etuláin founded a gaseosa (soft drink) factory with his father at Calle San Lorenzo 16, while the wine and meal business continued at what tax records from 1921 list as Carnicerías 3 and 5, a street that carries its modern name, Calle del Mercado, today. The building sat directly behind Pamplona’s Ayuntamiento, beside the Convento de Santo Domingo, a location that placed it at the center of the old town’s daily foot traffic, close to the market that gave the encierro its very first runners, without being on any of the city’s showcase squares.
By the time Hemingway found it in the 1920s, Casa Marceliano had already been operating under the same family for more than three decades, run by Matías Anoz, the founder’s son.
Hemingway’s Secret Place
Hemingway discovered Casa Marceliano in 1926, his second San Fermín. It was Matías Anoz who gave him the recipe for ajoarriero, a Navarrese salt-cod dish, when Hemingway asked for it directly. Ajoarriero became Hemingway’s stated favorite, though according to hemingway.es he rarely limited himself to it, working through estofado de toro, cordero al chilindrón, and magras con tomate on different mornings, always with Navarra wine.
The ritual was consistent for decades: Hemingway went to Casa Marceliano every morning immediately after the encierro and stayed until late morning, the same way generations of Pamplonicas have treated almuerzo as the meal that follows the running of the bulls, eating, drinking, and singing with the same aging circle of regulars. In 1953, writing in The Dangerous Summer, he described it directly: “In Pamplona we had our secret places like Casa Marceliano, where we went to eat, drink and sing after the encierro.” He added that the wood on the tables and staircase was polished like the teak deck of a yacht, “horribly stained with wine,” and that the faces around him had aged but the eyes hadn’t changed. It’s one of the more specific, unsentimental descriptions Hemingway left of any Pamplona establishment, closer to an inventory of a place he knew intimately than a tourist’s impression.
Casa Marceliano never became a spectacle the way the Café Iruña did, with its bronze Hemingway statue and dedicated corner. It stayed a working-class tasca, which appears to be exactly what kept Hemingway returning to it year after year.
Three Generations, Then the Arraztoas
The Anoz family ran Casa Marceliano from its founding through the 1950s. In the 1960s, the lease passed to the Arraztoa family, originally from the Baztán valley in northern Navarra. Provincial tourism records from 1965 list five Arraztoa siblings, Irene, María Luisa, Mari Paz, María Jesús, and María José, as the establishment’s titleholders. The last of the family to run it was Tomás Arraztoa Arraztoa.
Tomás closed Casa Marceliano’s doors in 1992, ending a run of well over a century under two families. That closure was not a retirement or a business failure in the ordinary sense. It was the direct result of a sale to Pamplona’s own City Council, which had specific plans for the building that had nothing to do with keeping it open.
The City Voted to Tear It Down
In 1992, Pamplona’s City Council purchased the Casa Marceliano building from the Arraztoa family for 135 million pesetas. The stated purpose was demolition. On November 13, 1992, the city’s governing plenary formally approved tearing down both Casa Marceliano and the adjacent Cuerpo de Guardia de Santo Domingo, the old guardhouse building next to it. The goal was to expose walls belonging to the historic Convento de Santo Domingo that the two later buildings had grown up against.
Neither building was demolished. Príncipe de Viana, Navarra’s cultural heritage institution, raised objections to the plan, and the demolition simply didn’t happen. What followed was not a quick reversal but a long stall: the building sat unresolved for roughly a decade, its former life as a tavern effectively frozen in place while the city figured out what to do with a structure it had bought to destroy and then couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tear down.
Sources differ slightly on exactly when the building reopened, with dates ranging from 2001 to 2002, but agree on what it became: municipal offices, with no plaque, sign, or marker identifying it as the former Casa Marceliano. Visitors following Hemingway’s Pamplona today can stand in front of the building and would have no way to know its history without already knowing to look for it. The Cuerpo de Guardia building spared in the same 1992 vote has had a different second life. It now houses a small visitor space dedicated to explaining San Fermín traditions to tourists.
The closure reportedly drew enough attention that at least one American newspaper ran critical coverage of the City Council’s role in ending a tavern with international literary associations, though the specific outlet isn’t independently documented in the sources available.
The Tavern That Reopened in Germany
The strangest postscript to Casa Marceliano’s closure happened outside Spain entirely. Axel Urban, a German admirer of Hemingway, arranged to buy part of the tavern’s furniture and tableware after it shut down. He then opened an establishment carrying the same name, Casa Marceliano, in the small German city of Flensburg, near the Danish border.
It’s an unusual outcome for a Pamplona institution: the physical fixtures that Hemingway described as polished like a yacht deck ended up more than 2,000 kilometers away, under new ownership, in a country the original tavern’s founders never visited. Meanwhile, the building on Calle del Mercado where those tables once stood continues its second life as a Pamplona city office, one of dozens of old-town addresses whose former identity survives only in municipal archives and Hemingway biographies.
FAQ
Does Casa Marceliano still exist in Pamplona?
No. The original tavern closed in 1992 when Pamplona’s City Council bought the building. It reopened in the early 2000s as municipal offices and carries no signage referencing its former identity. A restaurant using the same name operates today in Flensburg, Germany, built from furniture purchased after the original closed.
Why did Casa Marceliano close?
The City Council bought the building from the Arraztoa family in 1992 with the stated intention of demolishing it to expose the walls of the adjacent Convento de Santo Domingo. The city’s governing plenary formally approved the demolition on November 13, 1992. Heritage objections from Príncipe de Viana, Navarra’s cultural heritage authority, stopped the demolition, but the tavern itself never reopened as a business.
What did Hemingway eat at Casa Marceliano?
His stated favorite was ajoarriero, a Navarrese salt-cod dish, and owner Matías Anoz gave him the recipe directly after he asked for it. He also regularly ate estofado de toro, cordero al chilindrón, and magras con tomate, always with Navarra wine, during his daily visits after the encierro.
Where was Casa Marceliano located in Pamplona?
On Calle del Mercado, directly behind the Ayuntamiento and beside the Convento de Santo Domingo in Pamplona’s old town. The address appears in some historical tax records under the street’s earlier name, Carnicerías, before Pamplona renumbered and renamed the block.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.