Every list of Spanish tapas puts the tortilla española at the top, and almost every one of those lists treats it as a dish from nowhere in particular. The paper trail says otherwise. The first known written reference to the tortilla de patatas as a food people actually ate appears in an anonymous petition submitted to the Cortes de Navarra in 1817, which means the earliest documented sighting of Spain’s most famous dish happened in the same region that hosts San Fermín.
That detail changes how you read the tortilla’s presence in Pamplona each July. Visitors tend to file it under generic Spanish bar food, something they could order anywhere from Sevilla to Barcelona. Miss the Navarrese claim and you miss why the tortilla de patatas sits at the center of the fiesta’s most local eating ritual, the mid-morning almuerzo, and why a wedge of it over a bar counter at 9 a.m. is one of the most Pamplona things you can eat.
This article draws on the 1817 document reported by Diario de Noticias de Navarra, the rival 1798 Extremadura research published by Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC), the guidance the festival’s own site sanfermin.com gives on fiesta eating, and current reporting on the bars that Navarra’s hospitality association has judged to make the region’s best tortillas.
The 1817 Petition That Put the Tortilla on Paper
When the Cortes de Navarra met in the early 19th century, any citizen of the old kingdom could drop a written petition into a box known as the ratonera. One anonymous petition from 1817, remembered as the memorial de ratonera, described the miserable diet of Navarra’s rural families in order to contrast it with the tables of Pamplona and the Ribera. In listing what country people actually ate, it described eggs, potatoes, and oil, and noted that the women of the house knew how to make a tortilla big and thick with only two or three eggs by stretching it with potatoes and scraps of bread so it fed five or six people.
That passage is the earliest known written reference to the tortilla de patatas, and it was written in Navarra, about Navarrese cooking. It is worth being precise about what the document proves. It does not prove the dish was invented in Navarra. It proves that by 1817 the potato omelette was already ordinary food for ordinary Navarrese families, so established that a petitioner could cite it without explanation. Every March 9, when Spain marks the Día Mundial de la Tortilla de Patatas, Navarra’s press returns to this document as the region’s standing claim on the dish.
There is also a legend attached, and it deserves to be labelled as one. Popular tradition credits Tomás de Zumalacárregui, the Carlist general of the 1830s, with popularizing the tortilla after a Navarrese farmhouse improvised one for him from eggs, potatoes, and onion, and he adopted it as cheap, filling food for his troops. Historians treat the story as myth rather than record, but it says something that even the folklore version of the tortilla’s rise runs through Navarra.
The Rival Claim: Extremadura, 1798
Navarra’s 1817 document has one serious competitor. Research by Javier López Linage of Spain’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas identified a communication dated February 27, 1798, from Villanueva de la Serena in Extremadura, in which José de Tena Godoy y Malfeito and the Marqués de Robledo promoted a potato and egg preparation as cheap, nourishing food in a period of recurring famine. The finding was published in the agricultural weekly Semanario de Agricultura y Artes and later compiled in a book the town’s own council presents under the title Villanueva de la Serena, cuna de la tortilla de patatas (1798).
The two documents are not actually in conflict, because they record different things. The Extremadura papers document an invention proposal, two enlightened reformers deliberately promoting a new dish as famine relief. The Navarra petition documents a living habit, a dish that had already settled into the everyday cooking of rural families and needed no promotion at all. Read together, they sketch the tortilla’s real story: a scarcity dish born wherever eggs were short and potatoes were not, which had rooted itself in Navarrese kitchens by 1817 at the latest. Both claims involve careful archival work, and both regions defend theirs. What no one disputes is that the tortilla española, also written tortilla de patatas, grew out of poverty cooking, stretched few eggs across many mouths, and became the most universal plate in Spain.
What the Tortilla Actually Does During San Fermín
The tortilla’s job during San Fermín is specific, and it happens in the morning. Pamplona eats a mid-morning meal called the almuerzo, a working second breakfast that the fiesta turns into a street institution. On the morning of July 6, before the opening rocket fires, the streets of the Casco Viejo fill with long communal tables, and bars serve set almuerzos that in 2025 ran between 15 and 20 euros. Diario de Noticias described the standard plate at Bar Ksual, whose owner Carlos Alonso has run the morning service for more than 15 years: magras, txistorra, fried tomato, eggs, and potatoes, the same plate for every table so the kitchen can keep pace. The txistorra on that plate is Navarra’s own thin, fast-curing sausage, a different animal from chorizo entirely.
The tortilla’s place is even clearer at the self-organized version of the ritual. Cuadrillas, the groups of friends who move through fiesta together, mount their own street almuerzos on folding tables, and each member brings a dish. In Diario de Noticias’ reporting from July 6, the inventory was ganchitos, pizzas, and tortillas de patata, because a tortilla is the perfect communal contribution: cooked at home hours earlier, carried through a crowd without complaint, served at room temperature in wedges, and capable of feeding six people from a single pan, which is precisely the virtue the 1817 petition praised.
The festival’s own guide at sanfermin.com counts six distinct refuelling moments in a full fiesta day and describes the classic San Fermín brunch as a plate built on fried eggs with cured ham or txistorra. The encierro is run at 8 a.m. and is over within minutes, and the crowd that watched it disperses into the bars with exactly that meal in mind. The other classic post-run breakfast is hot chocolate with churros, a rival tradition with its own address on calle Mañueta that has fried them since 1872.
Where to Eat It in Pamplona Now
Navarra takes its tortillas seriously enough to rank them. The Asociación de Hostelería y Turismo de Navarra, the region’s hospitality association, runs an annual Semana de la Tortilla, and the 2025 edition drew 23 competing establishments from Pamplona, Tudela, Ayegui, Berriozar, Burlada, Corella, and Noáin. The traditional category, which permits only potato, egg, salt, olive oil, and optional onion, was won by El Monasterio on calle Espoz y Mina in Pamplona, a few minutes’ walk from the encierro route. The creative category went to La Catedral in Tudela for a tortilla with fresh piparra peppers, a repeat of its 2023 win. The word “optional” is doing diplomatic work in that rulebook: whether the tortilla should carry onion is Spain’s most contested culinary question, and the polls are not as close as the arguing suggests.
The detail worth stealing from that contest coverage is how El Monasterio’s owner and cook, Celia de Pedro, described her mornings: the first thing she does on arrival is set potatoes frying, because she puts between six and ten tortillas on the bar counter every day and the breakfast crowd asks for the pintxo de tortilla before anything else. That is the form the dish takes in Pamplona’s bars: not a plated ración but a thick wedge held by the slice of bread beneath it, eaten standing up. Ask for un pintxo de tortilla, using the Basque spelling pintxo that Pamplona’s bars use, though you will also see the Spanish spelling pincho elsewhere in Spain. Expect it at room temperature, which is how the dish is meant to be served, and expect to pay for it, since Pamplona’s bars do not follow the free-tapa custom of some other Spanish cities.
One warning for anyone visiting during the fiesta: locals reserve tables for the July 6 almuerzo months ahead, some renewing the same reservation year after year. Showing up that morning without one means eating your tortilla española standing in the street, which, to be fair, is how most of Pamplona eats it too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where was the tortilla española invented?
No document records a single inventor, but two archives compete for the earliest reference. A 1798 communication from Villanueva de la Serena in Extremadura, uncovered by CSIC researcher Javier López Linage, records two reformers promoting a potato and egg dish as famine relief. An 1817 petition to the Cortes de Navarra records the tortilla as food that rural Navarrese families already ate routinely. Extremadura holds the older paper, while Navarra holds the first record of the tortilla as an established everyday dish.
What is a pintxo de tortilla?
A pintxo de tortilla is a thick wedge of tortilla de patatas served on or with a slice of bread at a bar counter, the standard breakfast and mid-morning order across Pamplona and the Basque Country. Pintxo is the Basque spelling of the Spanish pincho. In Pamplona, prize-winning bars such as El Monasterio put six to ten fresh tortillas on the counter every morning, and the pintxo de tortilla is what the breakfast crowd orders first.
What do people eat after the running of the bulls in Pamplona?
The two classic choices are the almuerzo plate and churros. The almuerzo is a hearty mid-morning spread built on fried eggs, magras, txistorra, potatoes, and often a wedge of tortilla, served in bars from around 9 a.m. The alternative is hot chocolate with churros, most famously from the wood-fired churrería on calle Mañueta that opens almost exclusively during the fiesta. Both traditions exist because the encierro is run at 8 a.m. and is over within minutes, so the day’s eating starts immediately afterward.
Is tortilla española served hot or cold?
Room temperature is the standard, and it is deliberate. A tortilla firms up and gains flavor as it rests, which is why bars cook their tortillas first thing in the morning and serve them across the whole day, and why a tortilla can travel to a street almuerzo table during San Fermín without losing anything. In Navarra the preferred interior is jugosa, slightly juicy rather than fully set, a preference 62 percent of Navarrese share according to survey data reported by Diario de Noticias.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.