Peña Muthiko Alaiak was not founded as a peña at all. It began in late 1931 as a circle of friends around a Pamplona theater group called Zaldiko Maldiko, and the man who pulled it together, Ignacio Baleztena, had already written the words to “Uno de enero,” the counting song that would become the closest thing San Fermín has to an anthem. The same founding meeting settled another question that no other Pamplona peña of the era had even asked: women joined as full members, with voting rights, from day one.
That origin story matters because English-language coverage of Pamplona’s peñas flattens them into a single image, matching smocks and brass bands and long afternoons in the bullring. Treat them that way and you miss what each club actually contributed to the fiesta. In the case of Muthiko Alaiak, that contribution includes the song every visitor ends up humming, the countdown tradition built on top of it, and one of the earliest organized efforts to rescue Basque and Navarran folk dance from extinction.
The record here is unusually good. The Ayuntamiento de Pamplona maintains an entity file on the peña with its founding year, colors, and address. Diario de Noticias de Navarra published detailed coverage of the club’s 90th anniversary in 2021, drawing on testimony from its president and its own archives. And the paper trail on “Uno de enero” reaches back into the digitized Spanish press of the 1920s. This article is built on those sources.
From Zaldiko Maldiko to Muthiko Alaiak: The 1931 Founding
The name Zaldiko Maldiko came first. Ignacio Baleztena wrote short theatrical pieces and staged them with a circle of family and friends, and out of that theater group, at the end of 1931, came the club the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona still lists under its original impulse: a peña sanferminera founded in 1931, launched by Baleztena under the name Zaldiko Maldiko, and later renamed Muthiko Alaiak, Basque for “cheerful lads.” The spelling, with its archaic “th,” is a fingerprint of the era, written down before Basque orthography was standardized.
The founding roster was not a list of anonymous young men. Diario de Noticias names María Esther and José Condearena, Carlos Elizalde, Patxi Saralegui, the Arteta sisters, and Miguel Ángel Astiz, who would go on to serve as president. The presence of those women’s names is the point. Muthiko Alaiak is the only peña in Pamplona made up of men and women from its inception, and the club approved women’s right to vote unanimously at the start. In a festival culture where mixed membership was the exception rather than the rule, a club with voting women in 1931 was not a detail. It was a founding principle.
The club has grown into one of the city’s larger peñas. At its 90th anniversary in 2021 it counted 617 members, 460 adults and 157 children, and the adult rolls included 119 women. It fields a fanfarre, a dance group, a choir, a mountain group called Mendi Taldea, a basketball section with three decades of history, and a football team that plays in Pamplona’s Torneo Boscos. For a club that started on a living-room stage, the range is remarkable. Readers who want the fuller picture of how peñas work as institutions can start with how Peña Anaitasuna grew out of a football club, a different origin that ended somewhere similar, or how Peña Irrintzi’s own roots reach back to a 1930s football club merger, decades before its official 1951 founding date.
Ignacio Baleztena and “Uno de enero”: The Anthem and the Escalera
Baleztena is one of the most consequential figures in the modern fiesta, and most visitors have never heard his name. He wrote the lyrics to “Uno de enero”, and the digitized Spanish press archive places the song in print before November 1929. Its melody came from a folk tune of the Navarran mountains, set down in score by Silvanio Cervantes, the first director of La Pamplonesa, the city’s own band. The lyric is a countdown: one of January, two of February, three of March, climbing month by month until it lands on the seventh of July and the name San Fermín.
That climbing structure gave Pamplona a second tradition, the Escalera de San Fermín, the “staircase” of dates. On the first of January, the second of February, and each matching date after, peñas, families, and groups of friends meet for dinner and sing the song, marking one more step toward July. Since 2009 each Escalera date has also brought a mass at the Capilla de San Fermín, where a red pañuelo embroidered with the date is offered to the saint. A festival that lasts nine days in July is, through Baleztena’s song, celebrated in miniature seven times before it ever begins.
He did not stop there. Baleztena is also the man behind the Riau-Riau, the tradition Pamplona’s city hall eventually gave up trying to join, and his name threads through the songbook of the fiesta. The music of San Fermín tends to sound ancient and anonymous. It is neither. It has named authors, and the founder of Muthiko Alaiak is one of the most important of them.
Small Blue Checks on the Bull Run Street
Every peña in Pamplona is identifiable at a glance by its blusón, the work smock worn over festival whites. The Ayuntamiento’s file on Muthiko Alaiak specifies the club’s marks: a red faja and a red pañuelo carrying the embroidered club emblem, worn with a blusón in small blue and white checks. In the sea of plaids and solids that fills the old town in July, the fine blue check is the Muthiko signature. The red neckerchief itself has its own surprisingly recent history, which Pamplona’s press archives date to 1930, one year before this peña existed.
The address matters as much as the uniform. The club’s headquarters sits at Calle Estafeta 57, ground floor, which places its social life directly on the longest straight of the encierro route. The balcony above the club’s door looks down on the stretch where the bulls pass each morning of the fiesta at 8:00 AM. Most peña locales cluster on Calle Jarauta, a street of music and late nights but no bulls. Muthiko Alaiak lives on the run itself, and during the fiesta its doorway sits a few meters from the barrier line that separates spectators from six fighting bulls moving at full speed. That is not a marketing claim. It is a street number.
The club remains a member of the Federación de Peñas de Pamplona, the body that coordinates the city’s federated peñas, and its contact details are published by the city itself on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s entity page.
The Dance Group That Saved a Repertoire
Almost simultaneously with the peña itself, its members founded a dantza group with a stated mission: maintain, recover, and preserve the traditional dances of the whole Basque and Navarran cultural sphere. For many years, by the club’s own account and the anniversary coverage that documented it, this was practically the only group of its kind, and it became the precursor of the wider folklore-recovery movement that followed. The group traveled far beyond Navarra, dancing at the inauguration of the Barajas airport in Madrid, in Sevilla, in Santiago de Compostela, and abroad in Germany, Poland, and Hungary.
The club paid a price for its convictions in the middle of the century. Its founders came largely from Carlist circles, and in the years after the Civil War the club’s premises, most notably its longtime home at Plaza del Castillo 38, were shut by government order more than once, episodes the anniversary coverage documents from the police records of the period. The peña kept dancing anyway. Through those decades its membership and its cultural sections kept growing, and the dance group’s work of preservation continued without interruption. Today the dantza section runs three groups: a txiki group for children, a group for veterans, and an adult learners’ group known as the Negaus.
The choir arrived later, first singing publicly on the eve of Santa Águeda in 1964. For years it appeared only on that date, then added the Aurora sung to San Cernin at the church of San Saturnino and the annual mass for deceased members. Today it accompanies Olentzero, the Basque charcoal burner who brings children their Christmas gifts, through the streets of Pamplona every Christmas Eve, and it has performed as far afield as Catania and Austria.
The Rey de la Faba: A Medieval Coronation, Revived and Touring
The peña’s most singular tradition has nothing to do with July. The Fiesta del Rey de la Faba revives a custom documented from the reigns of the Teobaldos, the Champagne dynasty kings who ruled Navarra from 1234 to 1274 and imported courtly refinements from France. At Epiphany, the Navarrese kings offered a meal to the poorest children of the city. A bean, the faba, was hidden inside a cake, and the child who found it in his portion was proclaimed king for a day, honored with the full ritual of a coronation.
Baleztena, whose instinct for the archive equaled his instinct for a song, dug the ceremony out of historical records and recovered the coronation rituals of the old Navarrese monarchy. Under Muthiko Alaiak the revived fiesta was celebrated in Pamplona until 1963, when the club made a decision that defines the event to this day: it took the coronation on the road. Beginning in Olite, the ceremony has moved to a different Navarran town each year, with a child crowned before the assembled village. The first reina, a girl from Arróniz, was crowned in 2004, opening the title to both. The tradition is alive right now; in January 2026 the fiesta crowned its queen in one of the small towns of Navarra’s emptied interior, and the association that organizes it maintains the full history.
It is a strange and wonderful fact that a social club known to visitors for brass bands and blue-checked smocks also functions as the custodian of a 13th-century royal ceremony. That is what the peñas actually are beneath the July surface: cultural institutions with long memories.
FAQ
What does Muthiko Alaiak mean in English?
Muthiko Alaiak is Basque and translates roughly as “cheerful lads.” The spelling with “th” is archaic, dating from before Basque orthography was standardized, and the club has kept it as part of its identity since 1931.
When was Peña Muthiko Alaiak founded?
It was founded at the end of 1931 by Ignacio Baleztena and a circle of friends connected to his theater group, Zaldiko Maldiko. It is the only peña in Pamplona that has included men and women as members from its founding, with women holding voting rights from the start.
Where is Peña Muthiko Alaiak located in Pamplona?
Its headquarters is at Calle Estafeta 57, ground floor, in Pamplona’s old town. Calle Estafeta is the longest straight section of the encierro route, so the club’s balcony directly overlooks the morning bull run during San Fermín.
Who wrote the San Fermín song Uno de Enero?
The lyrics were written by Ignacio Baleztena, the founder of Muthiko Alaiak, to a folk melody from the Navarran mountains. The score was set down by Silvanio Cervantes, first director of La Pamplonesa, Pamplona’s city band. The song counts the dates from January 1 to July 7 and gave rise to the Escalera de San Fermín countdown tradition.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.