In June 2026, Pamplona’s city hall received Peña Irrintzi at the Casa Consistorial to mark its 75th anniversary, and the local press followed with matching coverage: 75 years, founded 1951, one of the fiesta’s most recognizable black blusones. The number is correct, and it is also only half the story. The club’s own published history, and the Ayuntamiento’s own reception remarks, both state plainly that Irrintzi’s roots reach back to 1930, seventy-five years being the age of the fiesta peña, not the organization that produced it. Do the arithmetic and the club is ninety-six. Irrintzi is not alone in carrying that kind of asterisk: Peña La Jarana’s own founding date carries a similar one, a 1940 date that the government’s own paperwork quietly calls a resumption rather than a start.
That gap matters because it explains something no press release does: why a social club built for nine days of July also fielded a football team, a mountaineering section, and a cycling squad for most of the twentieth century, and why its name is not really one word. Irrintzi is a fusion, the surviving half of a 1930 football club stitched together with a second team, Iruña, whose players eventually went their separate way and left their name behind in the peña’s own.
This account draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s entity record for the peña, Diario de Noticias de Navarra’s June and July 2026 anniversary coverage, and, most substantially, the club’s own institutional history page, which documents its founding decade by decade in a level of detail no outside source has matched.
From a San Nicolás Football Team to a Fiesta Club: 1930 to 1951
The club’s own account starts in 1930, with a football team of young men from several streets of the San Nicolás parish, organized under the name Club Deportivo Irrintzi. The first board rented a clubroom at Calle Campana 9 for 20 pesetas a month, and the team stayed active until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War ended it. It came back in 1940, meeting at a bar on the Paseo de Sarasate that no longer exists, and by 1945 was competing in the Frente de Juventudes championship, the sports league organized for young men under the dictatorship.
A second, similar football club existed in the same years: Iruña. As players and supporters of both teams mixed, they began going out together during Sanfermines in cuadrillas, singing in the street without instruments. The club’s own history credits that habit directly with the idea of forming a peña. The peña itself was organized in September 1950 and made its first appearance in the 1951 Sanfermines under the name Irrintzi de Iruña, with Jose Mª Morrás as its first president. The name was chosen deliberately, on the initiative of two of the founders, José María Rosagaray (“Koltio”) and Carlos Ainzúa, so that both merging clubs would be represented in the new one. It was the ninth peña of the modern era to be founded in Pamplona.
Black Blouses and a Shield Split in Two
Peña Irrintzi has worn a black blusón since its first outing, a choice its own history explains directly: the Basque word irrintzi, the shepherd’s high, piercing shout of the mountains, evokes the people of the high country, who traditionally wore black. In a fiesta built on bright plaids and solid colors, the black blouse remains the visual signature that separates Irrintzi’s members from every other peña on the street, worn with the club’s red faja and pañuelo.
The shield tells the merger story on its own. Adopted in its current form in 1957 and designed by Pablo Arina, it is built from two halves, one representing Irrintzi and the other Iruña, a literal record of the two clubs the peña grew out of. It had represented only the mountaineering section before being adopted as the club’s full emblem. Football stayed part of the club’s identity well past the split: in 1955, to mark the football side’s own silver anniversary, an Irrintzi team reinforced for the occasion played CA Osasuna at San Juan and lost 2-1, a friendly that would be unthinkable for most fiesta peñas today but made sense for a club that started life as a football side. Osasuna’s own history as one of the few fan-owned clubs left in Spain runs through exactly this era of Pamplona amateur football that produced peñas like Irrintzi.
Three Addresses in Forty Years: El Bayón to Calle del Carmen
Irrintzi’s clubhouse has moved three times, and each move is documented with a level of financial and logistical detail rare even among Pamplona’s peñas. On 23 August 1953, the club left its shared premises for a locale at Calle San Agustín 32, opposite the Frontón Euskal Jai, a building fiesta veterans still call “El Bayón.” Members advanced 60 pesetas each and did the fit-out work themselves as auzolan, communal labor. This is also the point at which the football team formally kept the Iruña name while the fiesta club kept Irrintzi, closing the loop that began with the 1930s merger.
In February 1964, under president Joaquín Reta, the club bought a first-floor flat at Calle Estafeta 23, financed through member bonds and a 200,000-peseta mortgage from the Caja de Ahorros Municipal de Pamplona. The location did not last: a dispute with the retired army officer living upstairs escalated into lawsuits and forced another search. Under president Félix Bacaicoa, the club bought a former bakery, long closed, at what is today numbered Calle del Carmen 8-12, on the ground floor. The renovated premises, fitted with a bar open to the public to help cover the loan, opened on 27 June 1971, and the club changed its name a final time, from Club Deportivo Irrintzi to the Sociedad Cultural, Deportivo y Recreativa Irrintzi, S.C.D.R. Irrintzi for short. The address has not changed since. The Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own entity listing confirms it as the club’s current headquarters.
The Struendo de Iruña: Midnight Noise from a Club Looking for Something to Do
Irrintzi’s clearest fingerprint on the modern fiesta calendar has nothing to do with football or founding dates. In 1964, a cuadrilla of the peña’s own mozos, restless with how little live music the Sanfermines nights offered at the time, started making noise on purpose. The result, the Struendo de Iruña, still runs today: hundreds of people gather at 23:59 outside the old Casa Marceliano on Calle Mercado carrying anything that makes noise, drums, bass drums, txistus, and march through the Casco Viejo, past the Plaza Consistorial, Calle Zapatería, San Nicolás, the Plaza del Castillo, Carlos III, and Estafeta, back to the Consistorial, finishing at Calle Mayor in front of the Iglesia de San Saturnino. It appears on no printed festival program. It spreads by word of mouth and local press alone, opening and closing with the tune “Agur Jaunak.” Diario de Noticias de Navarra’s own anniversary coverage credits Irrintzi’s members directly with starting it, a rare case of a single peña’s fingerprint on a tradition everyone in Pamplona recognizes without necessarily knowing where it came from. Peña tradition also credits Irrintzi with helping formalize a second, separate practice: the modern-day custom of adorning the saint’s small wall niche on Santo Domingo with the pañuelos of every peña before the run begins. That is distinct from the sung chant itself, “A San Fermín pedimos,” which carries its own well-documented authorship through Peña La Única’s own hymn.
Membership, the 1992 Vote, and the Club Today
Irrintzi capped its membership at just 60 under its first written rules in 1957, a ceiling that climbed with each renovation: 115 in 1962, 150 in 1971, 200 in 1994, 225 in 2000. Women were admitted as members for the first time in 1992, part of the same general meeting that rewrote the club’s statutes. Today the peña counts 275 members, a figure confirmed independently by both the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own entity page and the club’s own published records, and runs sections for football, mountaineering, culture, and a peña txiki for younger members alongside the fiesta peña itself. Its current president, Elena Marco Solano, represented the club at the Ayuntamiento’s 75th-anniversary reception in June 2026 alongside members Izaskun Asín Mora and Haritz Pascual Garjon. The peña’s hymn, still sung today, was composed by Manuel Turrillas, the same Navarrese composer behind most of the peña hymns that still echo through Pamplona every July, including those of Muthiko Alaiak and Peña Anaitasuna, another Pamplona peña born from a football club merger rather than founded as a fiesta club from the outset.
FAQ
When was Peña Irrintzi founded?
The fiesta peña was organized in September 1950 and made its first appearance in the 1951 Sanfermines. Its own institutional history traces the club further back to 1930, when it began as the Club Deportivo Irrintzi, a football team from Pamplona’s San Nicolás neighborhood. By that earlier date, the club is 96 years old in 2026, not 75.
What does Irrintzi mean?
Irrintzi is a Basque word for a high, piercing shout traditionally associated with shepherds and mountain people. The peña adopted a black blusón from its founding specifically because the name evokes the people of the high country, who traditionally wore that color.
Where is Peña Irrintzi located in Pamplona?
The club’s headquarters is at Calle del Carmen 8-12, ground floor, in Pamplona’s Casco Viejo, its home since 1971. Before that it was based at Calle Estafeta 23 (1964-1971) and, before that, at Calle San Agustín 32, a locale still remembered by fiesta veterans as “El Bayón.”
Did Peña Irrintzi start the Struendo de Iruña?
Yes. A cuadrilla of the peña’s own mozos started the Struendo in 1964 to bring more noise and music to the Sanfermines nights. It remains a spontaneous, word-of-mouth tradition today, absent from any printed program, gathering at 23:59 at the old Casa Marceliano before marching through the Casco Viejo.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.