Most write-ups of Pamplona’s peñas give Peña Anaitasuna a single line: founded 1949, red pañuelo, shield on the shirt pocket. The line is not wrong, but it hides the most unusual fact about this peña. Anaitasuna was not founded as a standalone fiesta club. It was organized in 1948 by the footballers of a neighborhood sports club barely two years old, and according to Pamplona’s own city hall, the creation of the peña is what transformed that modest Club Deportivo into the Sociedad Cultural Deportivo Recreativa Anaitasuna, the sports society whose name now hangs over one of the biggest athletic complexes in the city.
That inversion matters. Every other account treats the peña as a footnote to the sports club, or the sports club as a footnote to the peña. The documented history runs the other way in both directions at once: the club created the peña, and the peña reshaped the club. Miss that, and you miss why Anaitasuna, which means brotherhood in Basque, is the rare San Fermín peña whose fiesta identity and whose weekday identity are the same institution wearing two different shirts.
This article draws on the peña’s own published history, the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s records from the peña’s 75th anniversary reception in 2024, the festival’s reference documentation of the peñas, and the Diario de Noticias de Navarra’s anniversary reporting, including testimony from current members and officers.
Two Football Teams, One Tasca on Jarauta
The story starts in August 1946, when two Pamplona football squads, Hércules and Club Academia Mosquera, merged to form the Club Deportivo Anaitasuna. Football was the reason the club existed, but the founders chose a name that pointed somewhere broader: brotherhood.
Two years later, in 1948, the club’s players, along with new members and sympathizers, decided they wanted to celebrate Sanfermines together as a formal group. Their meeting point was La Perrera, a tasca on Calle Jarauta, the Casco Viejo street that remains the spiritual home of peña culture today. The first junta was presided over by Modesto Beperet, and the founding roll counted 40 members.
Pamplona’s peñas do not simply appear; the existing peñas admit newcomers. After nearly a year of preparation, the seven peñas then active in the city gave their approval in June 1949, and on July 7, 1949, Peña Anaitasuna stepped into Sanfermines for the first time behind a pancarta painted by Luis Cía Cayetano, wearing a shield designed by José María Iglesias, and singing a hymn written for the occasion by Manuel Turrillas.
Then came the structural twist. The peña was constituted as an autonomous section inside the sports entity, with its own governance and its own budget. Per the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s account, it was the creation of the peña that converted the Club Deportivo into the Sociedad Cultural Deportivo Recreativa Anaitasuna, the SCDR, a broader cultural and recreational society formalized in statutes drawn up in 1952. Today the peña and the mountaineering section are the only two sections of the SCDR that keep their own junta. The society went on to build a major sports complex in the San Juan neighborhood, and its handball team has competed in Spain’s top national division. During fiesta in the 1970s, members were bused from those San Juan facilities into the old city by microbus each day, until the pull of the Casco Viejo won out for good.
The Hymn Turrillas Wrote, and the One He Wrote Later
The peña’s hymn came from the most reliable pen in Navarra. Manuel Turrillas, the composer behind most of the peña hymns that echo through Pamplona every July, wrote Anaitasuna’s himno for that first 1949 salida. It is built the way the classic peña hymns are built: a pasacalles to move the crowd down the street, a jota in the middle, and a closing copla that spells the peña’s name out loud. One verse of the jota is sung in Basque, a bilingual touch that was quietly ahead of its time, and the lyrics manage to praise both the city’s women and its txakoli while teasing Madrid for having neither. The sound belongs to the txaranga, the brass street band, known in Spanish as a charanga, that gives every peña its voice on the move.
Turrillas was not finished with Anaitasuna. The society’s own history records that he later composed a second, separate hymn in 1972 for the SCDR itself, which was played at handball matches when the club competed in the top flight. One institution, two Turrillas hymns, which may be a distinction no other entity in Pamplona can claim.
Rather than reprint lyrics, listen to the real thing. Here is the peña’s hymn performed by Txaranga La Malatxo, the street band that accompanies Anaitasuna during fiesta:
Matt Carney, the American the Peña Adopted
For readers of this site, one name in Anaitasuna’s story will stand out. Matt Carney, the American who became arguably the most famous foreign bull runner in the fiesta’s history, entered Sanfermines through this peña. Carney first came to Pamplona in 1950 after meeting María Pilar Lassa, who invited him to know the fiesta and the peña. What he found with Anaitasuna he wrote about with evangelical enthusiasm in publications in Paris, the United States, and Ireland, and that writing helped carry San Fermín’s name abroad in the postwar years. The festival later awarded Carney its honorary pañuelo, one of the highest distinctions Pamplona gives a foreigner. The peña’s own history still names him among the members it remembers with particular affection.
Anaitasuna’s role in exporting the fiesta was recognized institutionally as well. In 1971, Spain’s Ministry of Information and Tourism awarded the peña its silver plaque for Tourist Merit, an acknowledgment that a neighborhood social club had become one of the festival’s ambassadors. The same year, the parent society took home the Copa Stadium, then Spain’s top national award for sporting achievement. Few institutions of any size have collected honors for both throwing a party and running a sports program within the same twelve months.
From Madrinas to a Declared Feminist Peña
For its first decades, Anaitasuna was a men’s club, and women appeared in exactly one starring role: the presentation of the madrinas, festival patronesses paraded to the Plaza de Toros in open cars with peinetas and mantillas. María Dolores Santesteban was the peña’s first madrina. Married women fed the club and kept its house; single women were invited to the dances.
The 1970s produced one tradition that members now retell with a wince and a laugh. A socio named Miguel Ángel Falces invented the Dimasu, the Día del Marido Suelto, a day on which husbands were let loose wearing a signed pass listing their return time. Any man who managed to extend his pass to the next morning owed the household churros from La Mañueta for breakfast. A women’s counterpart, the Dimusu, existed briefly, and current junta members cite the difference between the two days as a plain measure of the inequality of that era.
The change came through the ordinary mechanics of membership. Women became full members, and in 1981 Vicki Gaztambide became the first woman to sit on the peña’s junta. Today the board is five men and five women by design, and the peña publicly declares itself feminist, language almost no other peña in Pamplona has adopted formally. The parallel institution moved the same direction: in 2020 the SCDR elected Mercedes López Pérez de Urabayen, a peña member since 1994, as the first woman president in the society’s history. With around 260 members, the peña that once confined women to the madrinas’ float now runs on full parity.
Calle San Francisco 14: The Peña Today
Anaitasuna spent half a century as a tenant of the fiesta. It met at La Perrera, moved to Calle Mayor in 1953 while still marching out from the old tasca, and later squeezed into a rented local on Calle Jarauta that members describe as a bottleneck where sweat dripped from the ceiling. Peña lore from those Jarauta years includes the night member Fernando Lizaur persuaded a circus trainer to walk an elephant through the Casco Viejo and into the club’s own doorway. In 2003 the society bought and fitted out a permanent home, and the peña has operated ever since from Calle San Francisco 14, in the old city a few minutes’ walk from the Plaza Consistorial.
You can identify Anaitasuna on the street by what its members do not wear. There is no colored blusón over the whites. The markers are the original 1949 shield on the white shirt pocket and a figure of San Fermín printed on the red pañuelo inside a green diamond, with a small version of the pañuelo emblem added to shirts and polos since 2015. Red faja, white trousers, and that is the entire uniform.
The calendar runs far beyond July. The peña keeps a vermouth appointment on the morning of July 7, hosts a Día Txiki for children, plays out a long running mus championship, shares an almuerzo with the city’s comparsa of giants, and has maintained a twinning with Peña Aguazón of Tafalla for four decades. Each fiesta afternoon its members fill their block of seats on the sun side of the bullring with food, wine, and the txaranga, which the current president describes as the point in itself. The peña also awards its own distinction, the Pancarta de Oro, to figures who honor the fiesta; in 2008 it went to the actor Pedro Osinaga. Anaitasuna sits inside the Federación de Peñas de Pamplona, and it enters its second 75 years the way it entered its first: as the fiesta section of a brotherhood that never stopped meaning the word literally.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Peña Anaitasuna founded?
The peña was organized in 1948 by members of the Club Deportivo Anaitasuna football club, who met at La Perrera, a tasca on Calle Jarauta. The seven existing peñas of Pamplona approved the new group in June 1949, and it made its first appearance in Sanfermines on July 7, 1949. The peña celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2024 with a reception at Pamplona’s city hall.
What does Anaitasuna mean in Basque?
Anaitasuna means brotherhood in Basque. The name was chosen in 1946 by the football club formed from the merger of the Hércules and Club Academia Mosquera teams, and the peña inherited it in 1948. The Basque name predates the fiesta club: it described the spirit of the sports institution first.
Where is Peña Anaitasuna located in Pamplona?
Since 2003 the peña has had its own local at Calle San Francisco 14 in Pamplona’s Casco Viejo, a few minutes from the Plaza Consistorial. Before that it met at the La Perrera tasca on Calle Jarauta, on Calle Mayor from 1953, and in a small rented local back on Jarauta.
Who wrote the Peña Anaitasuna hymn?
Manuel Turrillas, the Navarrese composer responsible for most of the peña hymns of San Fermín, wrote Anaitasuna’s hymn for its debut in 1949. It follows the classic structure of a pasacalles, a jota with one verse sung in Basque, and a closing copla. Turrillas later wrote a second hymn in 1972 for the peña’s parent sports society.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.