Pamplona’s city hall lists Peña La Jarana’s founding year as 1940, plainly, with no footnote: address, phone number, colors, “FUNDACIÓN: 1940.” Every other source that mentions the club repeats the same date without asking what the paperwork behind it actually says. It says something more specific than “founded.” The Navarra government delegation’s own 1940 authorization to open the peña gave permission to “reanudar” its activities, to resume them, not to start them. That is not standard bureaucratic phrasing for a brand-new club. It is the language of an office reopening.
That word matters because it changes what La Jarana’s story actually is. A flat founding date makes the club sound like every other peña born in a single year with a clean origin story. A resumption makes it something else: a group that existed before 1940, lost its members and its leadership to the Spanish Civil War, and had to be rebuilt almost from nothing under a new government permit that quietly admitted, in its own bureaucratic language, that this was not day one. A photographed banner from 1931 backs that reading up, showing a group marching under the Jarana name nine years before its recorded founding.
This account draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own entity record for the peña, Diario de Noticias de Navarra’s reporting on the club’s founding circumstances and on the Federación de Peñas’ history, the peña’s own website for its colors and hymn, and current Navarra press coverage of the club’s 2024 and 2026 activities, cross-checked against each other rather than taken from any single source.
A 1940 Founding That Isn’t Really One
The plain version of La Jarana’s history, the one repeated on the city’s own entity page, says the peña was founded in 1940 by several cuadrillas of pamplonicas from Calle del Carmen, who took to the streets each Sanfermines with music and a banner, claiming their place in the stands of the bullring like every other peña of the era. That part is not in dispute. What gets left out is the paperwork behind it.
The Navarra government delegation’s 1940 authorization for the peña to formally open used the word “reanudar,” to resume, rather than “fundar,” to found. Diario de Noticias de Navarra’s reporting draws the obvious conclusion from that wording: the association already existed before the authorization was granted. The 1936 military coup and the war that followed scattered many of Pamplona’s social clubs along with everything else in the city, and La Jarana’s own membership and leadership appear to have been among the casualties, disappearing during the conflict and requiring the club to rebuild almost from scratch. The 1940 date on record is the year that rebuilding was formally recognized, not the year the group first existed. La Jarana is not alone in this pattern among Pamplona’s clubs: Peña Irrintzi’s own published history tells a similar story of an anniversary date that undersells the club’s real age.
A photograph backs up the earlier timeline directly. Local historical archives include an image of a 1931 banner carried by a group identifying itself under the Jarana name, nine years before the recorded founding and five years before the war that interrupted it. Whatever that earlier group’s exact relationship to the 1940 peña was, the surviving evidence, the banner and the permit’s own wording, both point the same direction: La Jarana’s real story is a survival, not a clean start.
Blue and White, and Three Addresses in Forty-Two Years
La Jarana’s colors are blue: a blue pañuelo and faja, worn over a blusón in small blue-and-white checks, the peña’s identification on record with the city today exactly as it has been for decades. The choice was not arbitrary. The group picked blue in imitation of Pamplona’s own civic colors, tying the club’s identity directly to the city rather than to a founder’s name or a neighborhood nickname the way several other peñas are named.
The clubhouse has moved three times. La Jarana’s first home was on Calle San Fermín, in the Ensanche district south of the old town, a location shared with the newer, planned parts of the city rather than the medieval core most peñas call home. From there the club moved to Calle Estafeta, the long straight run of the encierro route itself, before making its final move in 1982 to Calle Joaquín Jarauta 16, on the ground floor, in the heart of the Casco Viejo. That address is still the club’s headquarters today, and it puts La Jarana on the same street as the majority of Pamplona’s other peña headquarters, a late arrival to Jarauta after four decades spent elsewhere in the city.
Pamplonica Valiente: One Song, Two Versions
Every peña with any real age has a hymn, and La Jarana’s is called “Pamplonica Valiente,” composed by the late Manuel Turrillas, the same Navarrese composer behind the hymns of several other Pamplona peñas still sung today. The club’s own website hosts the printed lyrics in both Spanish and Basque, the Basque text titled “Iruindar Trebeak,” alongside audio of the melody itself.
There is also a second, unwritten version. The peña’s own site notes, almost in passing, that the popular variant sung informally in the streets swaps in an ironic line about work and the Guardia Civil, the kind of small, self-aware joke that circulates among members long after a hymn is set in print and that printed lyric sheets rarely acknowledge exists at all. It is a small detail, but it is the club admitting, in its own words, that the song people actually sing during fiesta week is not always the one printed on the page.
The Peña That Broke a Barrier First
For most of the twentieth century, peña leadership in Pamplona was a male domain by default, one of the clearest examples of how unevenly Sanfermines distributed its public roles between men and women. La Jarana is the club that changed that. Txaro Pardo became the first woman to preside over a Pamplona peña, leading La Jarana at a moment when no other club had put a woman in that chair, and went on to serve roughly a decade as spokesperson for the Comisión de Peñas, the coordinating body that speaks for the city’s clubs collectively.
Pardo was part of a small group of women, reported at around nine, who pushed to participate in Sanfermines on their own terms rather than as an extension of the men already running things. The precise year her presidency began is not recorded in available sources, only that it fell within the club’s broader history of the 1970s onward, but the fact of it, a first for the entire peña system, is one of the more consequential details in La Jarana’s history and one that rarely makes it past a single line in anniversary coverage.
What La Jarana Does Today
La Jarana’s most visible modern tradition has nothing to do with its founding date. Since 2001, the club has handed out an annual award called “El Bombo de La Jarana” to people or groups connected to San Fermín, a way of formally thanking the parts of the festival that rarely get thanked. Past recipients include the Comparsa de Gigantes y Cabezudos, the staff of the Plaza de Toros, and the encierro’s pastores. In 2024 the award went to photographer Joxe Lacalle Ugarte, honored, in the words of then-president Bittor Aranaz, for the photographers who work “más en la sombra,” more in the shadows, capturing the festival’s real character one click at a time.
In 2026, La Jarana gave the award to the Hermanos Aldaz Remiro carpentry crew, the team that installs the encierro’s wooden vallado fencing along the full route each year, roughly 850 meters of it, built from around 900 posts and 2,700 planks, assembled and dismantled on a strict annual schedule that most visitors never think about. La Jarana also organizes the Carrera del Encierro, an annual footrace that retraces 799 meters of the route’s cobbled stretch from the Santo Domingo corrals to the bullring, steep initial ramp included. The 2026 edition was the 41st, which places the race’s own origin in the mid-1980s, decades after the peña’s own founding but now a fixture of the pre-fiesta calendar in its own right.
FAQ
When was Peña La Jarana founded?
The founding date on record with the city of Pamplona is 1940. The government permit that formalized the club that year used the word “reanudar,” to resume, rather than “fundar,” to found, and a photographed banner from 1931 shows a group marching under the same name nine years earlier, suggesting the group existed before the Spanish Civil War interrupted it and had to be rebuilt.
What colors does Peña La Jarana wear?
La Jarana wears a blue pañuelo and faja with a blusón in small blue-and-white checks. The blue was chosen in imitation of Pamplona’s own civic colors.
Where is Peña La Jarana’s headquarters?
La Jarana’s current headquarters is at Calle Joaquín Jarauta 16, ground floor, in Pamplona’s Casco Viejo, its home since 1982. Before that the club was based on Calle Estafeta, and before that on Calle San Fermín in the Ensanche district.
What is the Peña La Jarana song called?
The peña’s hymn is “Pamplonica Valiente,” composed by Manuel Turrillas, with printed lyrics in Spanish and Basque. A separate, unwritten version sung informally by members includes a joking reference not found on the printed lyric sheet.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.