Walk through the Casco Viejo on any night of San Fermín and you will eventually hear a few thousand people bellow the same defiant line in unison: “pero sigo siendo el rey.” It is one of the loudest, most reliable singalongs of the whole fiesta. It is also, improbably, a Mexican ranchera written more than 5,000 miles from Pamplona by a man who never set foot in Navarra. The history of the El Rey song at San Fermín is not a story of local folklore at all. It is a story of adoption.
This matters because most guides to San Fermín’s music assume the fiesta’s anthems grew out of Navarrese and Basque tradition, the txistu, the jota, the peña hymns written by local bandmasters. Many did. El Rey did not. Treating it as just another old fiesta tune misses the more interesting truth: Pamplona reached outside its own tradition, took a 1971 cantina song about wounded pride, and turned it into a communal roar. Understanding why says something real about how the fiesta actually sings.
The account below is drawn from the song’s documented recording history, from Mexican cultural coverage including the José Alfredo Jiménez family’s own statements, and from Navarrese reporting on the songs the peñas carry through the streets each July. The focus here is the street, the peña, and the crowd, which is where the song actually lives during the fiesta.
A Cantina Song, Not a Fiesta Song
El Rey, “The King,” is a 1971 ranchera by the Mexican singer-songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez, who was born in Dolores Hidalgo in 1926 and died in 1973. Jiménez had no formal musical training, yet he became one of the most prolific and respected composers of Mexican vernacular music, the author of a vast catalogue of rancheras that are still standards today. He recorded El Rey with the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, and it became the song most associated with his name.
The lyric is not celebratory. It is the voice of a man with nothing left but his pride, a figure, as one reference work puts it, “convinced his rough-and-tumble life doesn’t preclude him from remaining the king among his peers.” He has no throne and no queen and nobody who understands him, and he insists, with or without money, that he still does exactly as he pleases. The story his family tells is that the song grew out of a night of jealousy in a restaurant, after which Jiménez shut himself inside El Tenampa, a famous Mexico City cantina, and finished the words in a single sitting. Accounts of that night vary, so it is best treated as the story the family passes down rather than settled fact.
What is not in doubt is the song’s stature. El Rey was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame, and the version recorded by Vicente Fernández became so central to the Mexican songbook that in 2025 the United States Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry. A Record World chart even credited the song as reaching number one in Mexico in 1974, a year after Jiménez had died. It is, by any measure, a monument of ranchera music. Which makes its second life, as a Spanish fiesta anthem, all the stranger.
How a Mexican Ranchera Reached Pamplona
Somewhere along the way, without any ceremony or decree, El Rey crossed the Atlantic and lodged itself in San Fermín. It is now sung every year across the nine days of the fiesta, from July 7 to July 14, and it has done so for long enough that most people singing it in Pamplona have no idea it is Mexican at all. There was no formal adoption. The song simply proved too good at the one job a fiesta song has to do, which is to be sung by everyone at once.
The connection has become well known enough in Mexico that Jiménez’s own family has remarked on it. His son, José Luis Jiménez Medel, has said publicly that hearing Spaniards sing his father’s song each July at San Fermín gives him goosebumps, a small measure of how far the ranchera has travelled from the cantina where it was born. For a song about a man insisting he is still a king despite having lost everything, there is a certain fitness in a whole foreign city adopting it as a shout of collective defiance.
In Pamplona the song lives where the fiesta’s music always lives, with the peñas and their brass bands. It sits alongside the home-grown anthems in the same repertoire, and it is precisely because it came from outside that it is worth noticing. San Fermín did not only inherit its soundtrack. It also went shopping for it, and one of its best finds was a mariachi standard.
Why the Chorus Works for a Crowd
The reason El Rey works at San Fermín is structural, and it is the part almost no coverage bothers to explain. A mass singalong does not need a good story or clever verses. It needs a chorus that anyone can join on the second pass, and El Rey has one of the most joinable choruses ever written. The hook is short, first person, and defiant: the crowd only has to land the phrase “sigo siendo el rey,” I am still the king, and the whole plaza can carry it.
It also has a built-in call and response. The line about crying folds back on itself, “llorar y llorar,” a phrase that repeats and invites the crowd to throw it straight back. You do not need to know the verses about the stone in the road or the muleteer’s advice. You need the refrain, and the refrain is engineered to be shouted rather than sung. That is why a two-minute Mexican lament becomes a stadium-sized chant in a Navarrese street: the emotional content is the wounded pride, but the mechanical content is a chorus a drunk, delighted, exhausted crowd can nail on no rehearsal.
Here is the song in its original form, recorded by José Alfredo Jiménez himself, so the shape of that chorus is clear before you ever hear it roared back by a few thousand people at two in the morning.
El Rey and the Peñas
If El Rey has an institutional home in Pamplona, it is the peñas, the social clubs whose brass bands set the fiesta’s rhythm. Their txarangas, the marching street bands known in Spanish as charangas, carry the song through the Old Town along with the rest of their book, and Navarrese reporting has tied it particularly to the peña Armonía Txantreana. The clubs guard these songs closely. According to Diario de Noticias de Navarra, an attempt some years ago to swap El Rey for another ranchera, “Volver, Volver,” fell flat with a crowd that had been waiting a full year to sing about their king again, and the traditional choice was quickly restored.
That protectiveness is the tell. A fiesta does not defend a song it merely likes; it defends a song that has become part of how it recognizes itself. El Rey now sits in the same emotional register as San Fermín’s home-grown anthem “Uno de Enero”, even though one was written by a Pamplona peña founder and the other by a Mexican who never saw the city. Both do the same work. They give thousands of people a single set of words to shout at the same moment.
It also fits a pattern. As a closer look at the real authorship behind San Fermín’s music shows, the fiesta’s soundtrack is far less ancient and far more deliberately assembled than it sounds. Songs get chosen, tested against the crowd, kept or dropped. El Rey is simply the most well-travelled example of that process, a Mexican ranchera that a Spanish city auditioned, adopted, and now refuses to give up.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the song El Rey about?
El Rey is a ranchera about wounded pride and defiance. The narrator has lost love, money, and companionship, yet insists he still does whatever he wants and remains “the king” regardless. José Alfredo Jiménez wrote it in 1971, and it is widely read as a statement of self-worth in the face of rejection rather than a boast about actual power.
Why do they sing El Rey at San Fermín?
It is sung because its chorus is built for a crowd. The refrain “sigo siendo el rey” is short, defiant, and easy to shout in unison, which is exactly what a fiesta singalong needs. Over the years Pamplona’s peñas and their txarangas folded it into their street repertoire, and it is now performed throughout the July 7 to 14 celebration.
Who wrote El Rey?
The Mexican singer-songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez, born in Dolores Hidalgo in 1926 and died in 1973. He composed and first recorded El Rey in 1971 with the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. Vicente Fernández later recorded the best-known version, which the United States Library of Congress added to its National Recording Registry in 2025.
Is El Rey a Spanish or Mexican song?
It is Mexican. El Rey is a ranchera, a genre rooted in Mexican rural and mariachi tradition, written and first performed by a Mexican composer. Its status as a San Fermín anthem in Pamplona is a case of adoption, not origin: Spain took a Mexican song and made it part of a Spanish fiesta.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.