Ask an English-language guide about the music of San Fermín and you will get the same answer every time: brass bands, everywhere, day and night, origin unspecified, as if the sound of the fiesta simply grew out of the cobblestones. It did not. The core repertoire of San Fermín has named composers, documented premiere dates, and a paper trail that runs through Pamplona’s own municipal archives. That pedigree should surprise nobody in the hometown of Pablo Sarasate, the violinist who came back for San Fermín every July. One of the top-ranking English pages on the subject even claims the city band has been playing since the 1860s. The band’s own published history says it was founded in 1919, with a named conductor, a named president, and exactly 37 musicians.
This matters because the anonymous version flattens what is actually one of the most personal things about the fiesta. The San Fermín music you hear at 6:45 in the morning is played by a salaried civic institution older than most of the buildings around it. The peña anthems bellowed from the txarangas were mostly written by one man, a cooperative clerk from a small Navarrese village. The song every visitor learns without trying was a joke about city councilmen. Knowing who wrote what changes how you hear all of it.
This article draws on the published history of La Pamplonesa itself, the Turrillas collection file at the Music and Performing Arts Archive of Navarre, the festival’s traditional website, program notes from the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona, and the Baleztena family’s own publication of Ignacio Baleztena’s memoirs.
La Pamplonesa: The 1919 Civilian Band That Runs the Festival Clock
Until the end of the First World War, festival music in Pamplona was supplied by three military bands, attached to the Almansa, América, and Constitución regiments garrisoned in the city. Pamplona wanted its own civilian band, and a youth ensemble run by musician Silvanio Cervantes had already dissolved around 1917 precisely because citizens did not want their music governed by the military.
On September 24, 1919, Cervantes joined Vicente Sádaba and Manuel Zugarrondo to found the Banda de Música La Pamplonesa with 37 musicians. Cervantes conducted. The new band gave its first performance on October 11, 1919, marching through the streets with a pasodoble and a jota, and the city hired it for the Sanfermines of 1920. The full history is on the band’s own site, including a detail that says a great deal about how the fiesta has shifted over a century: in 1920 the morning dianas began at 5 a.m., because the encierro then ran at 6.
More than a hundred years later, La Pamplonesa still runs the festival clock. It plays the txupinazo, the opening rocket ceremony at noon on July 6, known in Spanish spelling as the chupinazo. It leads the Riau-Riau parade route from the Ayuntamiento toward the church of San Lorenzo that same afternoon. From July 7 to 14 it sets off from the Town Hall at 6:45 each morning to play the dianas until about 7:30, following a different route each day so that in eight days it covers the entire Casco Viejo. On July 7 it marches in the procession of the saint alongside the cathedral chapter, the comparsa of giants, txistularis, and gaiteros, and on July 14 it closes the cycle at the Octava mass. If you hear organized music in Pamplona during fiesta at a fixed hour, it is usually this one band.
Manuel Turrillas: The Cooperative Clerk Who Wrote the Peñas’ Anthems
The sound most visitors actually remember is the txaranga, the peña brass band, spelled charanga in Spanish. What almost nobody tells them is that the anthems those bands play were largely written by a single composer. Manuel Turrillas Ezcurra was born in Barasoain, a village south of Pamplona, on January 1, 1905, moved to the city with his family in 1927, and spent roughly fifty years playing in La Pamplonesa. Music was never his salaried job. He worked as an employee and later secretary of an agricultural cooperative until 1964, then for a commercial firm until retiring in 1975.
In between, he wrote the soundtrack of the fiesta. Turrillas composed the hymns of most of Pamplona’s peñas, including Aldapa, Anaitasuna, La Jarana, Muthiko Alaiak, and Oberena, along with festival standards such as El primer cohete and Alegría sanferminera. Diario de Navarra reported that when La Pamplonesa recorded a tribute CD of his peña pasacalles, it ran to thirteen hymns. When he died in Pamplona on October 20, 1997, he left hundreds of registered compositions, and in 2017 his six children donated the complete collection, 16 folders of songs, 3 of jotas, and 265 recordings among other materials, to the Music and Performing Arts Archive of Navarre, where it is held as its own fond by the Government of Navarra. The men playing his tunes tonight on Calle Jarauta mostly never knew his name. The archive did.
Uno de Enero Was a Joke About City Councilmen
The song every visitor absorbs by osmosis, the one counting up the days of the months toward the seventh of July, has an author, a date, and a surprisingly petty origin. Ignacio Baleztena Ascárate took his seat as a newly elected Pamplona city councilman on January 1, 1916. By his own account, published by his family from memoirs he wrote in 1962, he sat through an interminable council session about taxing dance societies and passed the time composing mocking verses about the walk and mannerisms of each of his fellow councilmen, set in his head to a wildly popular Basque biribilketa street tune he knew as Artolatoki.
He sang the verses that night at his tertulia in the Kutz café. They spread through Pamplona within weeks, and by the Sanfermines of 1916 the whole city knew them. The verses about long-forgotten councilmen died with their targets. The refrain, the counting of days that ends at San Fermín’s feast day, never did. Some reference works date the fixed written form of the song to the 1920s, when Silvanio Cervantes, the same man who conducted La Pamplonesa, set the score to paper. The two accounts are not really in conflict: the song was born in 1916 and formalized later.
The refrain also generated a tradition of its own, the Escalera de San Fermín, in which peñas, families, and groups of friends mark each date the song names, January 1, February 2, and so on, with dinners through the first half of the year. Since 2009 each escalera date has also been marked with a mass in the Capilla de San Fermín, where groups offer the saint a red pañuelo embroidered with the date.
The Chant Before the Encierro Is Younger Than It Sounds
At 7:55 on the morning of the run, runners packed onto the slope of Santo Domingo turn to a small image of San Fermín in a niche and sing to him, three times over, before the rockets fire. The words ask the saint, as patron, to guide them in the encierro and give them his blessing. Nothing about the scene suggests it is younger than the grandparents of the men singing it.
It is. According to the festival’s traditional website, the words and air were written in the early 1950s by a group of Pamplona friends who had no idea it would ever be sung to the saint before a bull run. The song entered the repertoire of Los Iruña’ko, one of Navarra’s best-known vocal groups, whose recordings for Columbia and Zafiro carried it far beyond Pamplona. Only in the early 1960s did the regulars of the first stretch of the course begin singing it at the niche before the run, and the tradition set from there. Since 2009 the chant has also been sung in Basque, and both versions end the same way, with Viva San Fermín shouted in Spanish and Gora San Fermín in Basque.
Beyond the Brass: Gaita, Txistu, and the Nightly Era
Two older instruments carry the parts of the fiesta the brass does not reach. The gaita, a bagless double-reed pipe played by the city’s gaiteros, is the sound that makes the giants of the comparsa dance their waltzes, polkas, and jotas each morning. The txistu, the one-handed Basque flute played with the ttun-ttun drum, belongs to the processions and to the txistularis who march in the civic cortege on July 7. Both sit in a family of Basque and Navarrese instruments with far deeper roots than the 20th-century repertoire above, a family whose strangest member, the alboka, survived on the breath of two shepherds.
The dancing has its own fixed points. Every evening of fiesta at 9 p.m., couples circle the bandstand of the Plaza del Castillo for the Baile de la Era, a chained sequence of six dances, from the opening cadena through jota vieja, waltz, fandango, and boleras to the closing correcalles, that anyone may join by copying the couple ahead. And on the afternoon of July 6, the crowd outside the Ayuntamiento dances the Vals de Astráin up the street toward San Lorenzo in the Riau-Riau, a tradition with its own contested history that deserves, and has, its own telling.
None of this is frozen. For 2026 the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona programmed the Plaza del Castillo stage to open on July 6 with Isabel Aaiun followed by the disco catalog of Boney M, put the Australian electronic artist CC:DISCO! at the head of the Plaza de la Compañía lineup, and scheduled eight pasacalles to work Avenida de Carlos III over the week. The music of San Fermín has never been one thing. It is a 1919 band, a clerk’s hundreds of jotas, a councilman’s joke, a 1950s vocal number turned prayer, two ancient pipes, and whatever the city booked this spring, all playing at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
What song do runners sing before the running of the bulls?
Runners sing A San Fermín pedimos, a short verse asking the saint to guide them in the encierro and give them his blessing. It is sung three times at the niche of San Fermín on Cuesta de Santo Domingo in the minutes before 8 a.m., in Spanish and, since 2009, also in Basque. The words were written in the early 1950s by a group of Pamplona friends and popularized by the vocal group Los Iruña’ko before runners adopted the custom in the early 1960s.
What time are the dianas in Pamplona during San Fermín?
La Pamplonesa, the city’s municipal band, leaves the Town Hall at 6:45 a.m. every morning from July 7 to 14 and plays the dianas through the streets of the old town until about 7:30. The route changes daily so the band covers the whole Casco Viejo across the eight mornings. It is the traditional wake-up call before the 8 a.m. encierro.
Who wrote the San Fermín song Uno de Enero?
The lyrics were written by Ignacio Baleztena Ascárate, a Pamplona city councilman, who by his own memoir composed them during a council session in 1916 as mocking verses about his fellow councilmen, set to a popular Basque biribilketa tune. Silvanio Cervantes, first conductor of La Pamplonesa, later wrote down the score. Only the counting refrain survived, and it gave rise to the Escalera de San Fermín dinner tradition.
What is a txaranga at San Fermín?
A txaranga, spelled charanga in Spanish, is a street brass band, and each of Pamplona’s peñas has one. They play the peña hymns, most of them composed by Manuel Turrillas between the 1930s and the 1990s, through the streets day and night during the fiesta. They are the dominant sound of San Fermín after the rockets.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.