Most visitors researching how to reach Sanfermines assume that a city with its own airport must have its own reliable air access. Pamplona Airport, code PNA, does exist, six kilometers south of the city near the village of Noaín. But as of this writing, it serves exactly three destinations through two airlines: Madrid, Gran Canaria, and Tenerife Norte. There is no direct flight from anywhere outside Spain. There has not been one since March 2020.
This matters because 2026 was supposed to be the year that changed. Regional officials publicly floated new connections to London, Rome, Milan, Frankfurt, and Munich. None of that has happened. The tender built to attract those airlines drew zero bids, and the government has since pulled back to a smaller, domestic-only plan. Anyone planning travel around the festival who is counting on flying directly into Pamplona is planning around a route network that, in practice, has not grown since a single new domestic connection appeared in 2025.
This account is built from Aena’s own current published data (the airport’s operator), verified live at the time of writing, cross-checked against Wikipedia’s sourced traffic tables, and drawn from Navarra’s regional press, Diario de Noticias de Navarra, reporting on the airport’s 2026 route-expansion tender in real time.
From a 1910 Landing to a 1972 First Flight
Noaín’s connection to aviation goes back further than the airport itself. In April 1910, a French aviator based in San Sebastián, Leonce Garnier, made the site one of the earliest aviation locations in Spain. In May 1929, the aviator and engineer Julio Ruiz de Alda, who had piloted the historic transatlantic Plus Ultra flight three years earlier, landed at the Noaín field on a survey trip and praised its conditions publicly, suggesting it could serve as a stopover point for Paris-Madrid-Canarias flights given its position near the Pyrenees. His only complaint was the lack of a hangar. Ruiz de Alda would not live to see the airport built; he was killed in Madrid in August 1936.
For the next four decades, the idea of an actual airport at Noaín kept getting drawn up and shelved. City authorities weighed alternate sites at Arazuri, Orkoien, and Aizoáin, with aviation officials at one point judging Arazuri-Orkoien technically superior for its space and orientation, before repeatedly returning to Noaín anyway, citing lower cost and Noaín’s existing use for a 1949 international flying rally. War, then postwar reconstruction, paralyzed the project entirely through the 1940s, and even after a formal project was costed at 20 million pesetas in 1958, another decade passed before ground was actually broken.
The runway itself did not exist until 1969. On October 3 of that year, a light aircraft from the Real Aeroclub de Navarra flew the unofficial inauguration of a 1,000-meter strip. Regular passenger service followed on July 6, 1972: an Aviaco Fokker F-27, a twin-engine turboprop carrying 44 passengers, flew the round trip from Madrid in about an hour, with a ticket priced at 975 pesetas. Rockets were fired at the airfield and dancers from the Anaitasuna peña performed to mark the occasion, in a ceremony regional press covered as a milestone for Navarra’s connection to the rest of the world.
The first paying passenger was Julia Gurumeta, a young secretary from Madrid who had bought her ticket in advance specifically to fly in for San Fermines. She told a reporter covering the flight that she had attended the year before and promised herself she would come back whenever she could. Her one line, recorded the day the airport opened to regular traffic, captures something that has stayed true for more than fifty years: whatever this airport becomes, it was built, in part, to carry people toward this one week in July.
The passenger terminal itself opened a year later, on July 6, 1973, along with the airport’s first control tower and access road. The facility that exists today, a 12,400-square-meter terminal with nine check-in counters, two security lanes, three boarding gates, and capacity for up to 1.1 million passengers a year, opened in November 2010 after a multi-year investment by Aena, the Spanish airport operator. The runway was extended to its current 2,407 meters the same year.
The Traffic Never Recovered From Its 2007 Peak
Pamplona Airport’s best year on record is 2007, when it handled just over 500,000 passengers. Traffic has never come close to that figure since. In 2025, the airport carried 233,398 passengers, according to Aena’s own published airline data, up from 220,423 in 2024 and roughly in line with 2019’s 243,000. The airport describes its traffic as “primarily scheduled and domestic,” which is a polite way of saying it has almost no international service and hasn’t for years.
The one real exception was Frankfurt. Lufthansa flew Pamplona direct to Frankfurt from November 6, 2017, until March 29, 2020, a run of just under two and a half years that carried roughly 100,000 passengers. The schedule ran four times a week most of the year and became a daily flight during the 2019 summer season, using an Airbus A319 with 138 seats. Lufthansa suspended the route at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and never brought it back. Today the airline flies daily out of Bilbao instead, and Pamplona is not currently considered profitable enough for Lufthansa to reconsider on its own.
As of today, Iberia flies the Madrid route (170,828 passengers in 2025, more than 80% of all airport traffic), and Binter Canarias operates to Gran Canaria (33,312 passengers) and, as a genuinely new addition, Tenerife Norte (17,374 passengers), a route that only began in 2025. Small numbers of passengers also moved through the airport in 2025 on routes to Istanbul, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, and even Tinduf in Western Sahara, but these read as seasonal charter traffic tied to specific dates rather than scheduled service; Aena’s own live destinations page lists only the three routes above as current, regular offerings.
Why the 2026 Expansion Everyone Heard About Hasn’t Happened
In December 2025, the Government of Navarra opened a public tender worth 4 million euros, structured into four lots aimed at attracting airlines to Pamplona Airport. Two lots targeted international routes: London, Rome, and Milan in one group, Frankfurt and Munich in another. Two more targeted domestic connections: Andalucía (Seville or Málaga) and the return of a Barcelona route. Not a single airline submitted a bid. The tender closed empty.
By May 2026, the regional government had changed course. Rebeca Esnaola, Navarra’s councilor for Culture, Sport, and Tourism, announced the new approach directly: the budget would rise to 5 million euros, but the scope would shrink to domestic routes only, for now. She cited an “adverse international context,” pointing to aircraft shortages, aviation supply-chain problems, and the effect of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East on European air traffic generally. The stated goal became two new domestic connections, most likely Andalucía and Barcelona, launched before the end of 2026, with a new tender to be published on the EU’s public procurement portal in the following weeks. Navarra is not alone in this problem: nearby Vitoria-Gasteiz and Logroño ran similar tenders for their own airports in the same period and also drew no bidders.
None of this had changed the airport’s actual route map by the time this article was written. Aena’s live destinations page still shows the same three routes it has shown since Tenerife Norte was added in 2025. International charter flights, the article’s sourcing confirms, do continue to leave Pamplona on select dates tied to holidays or specific events, entirely separate from this regular-route tender process, but that is not the same thing as a scheduled international connection a traveler can plan a trip around. Anyone reading a headline about Pamplona adding European routes in 2026 is reading about a plan that stalled before it produced a single flight.
Getting To and From the Airport in Practice
Pamplona Airport sits about six kilometers from the city center, near Noaín. There is no functioning public bus connection. A city bus line did run hourly between the airport, the city center, and the Renfe train station starting in November 2017, but low ridership led to its cancellation about a year and a half later, and it has not returned. Today, the practical options are driving, a metered taxi, or a reservation-based shared taxi service that runs between Paseo Sarasate and the airport several times a day. The terminal itself has on-site car parking, and Aena’s own booking system lets travelers reserve a space in advance.
Inside the terminal, facilities are modest by design: nine check-in counters plus one for oversized or special baggage, two security screening lanes, and a 765-square-meter departure lounge serving all three of the terminal’s boarding gates. Check-in counters generally open about two hours before a scheduled departure and close 45 minutes before takeoff, standard for an airport this size rather than a special festival-week accommodation. On-site parking is available and can be booked in advance through Aena’s official Pamplona Airport site, which is worth doing during the second week of July, when every form of transport into Pamplona sees heavier demand than usual, including for visitors arriving to join Encierro’s own tour packages and needing a firm plan for getting from the terminal to the Old Town before a pre-dawn briefing.
It is a small building built for a small, largely domestic passenger base, and it has twice been recognized by Airports Council International for its cleanliness and hygiene standards, most recently in 2024, along with a 2024 award for Best Airport in Europe in its passenger-volume category. Aena’s own materials for airlines explicitly cite San Fermín, held every year from July 6 to 14, alongside MICE tourism, health tourism, and the Camino de Santiago, as one of the specific reasons the region’s air connectivity has economic value worth investing in. The airport authority itself, in other words, treats the festival as a reason more routes should exist here. So far, that has not been enough to make it happen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you fly directly to Pamplona for San Fermín?
Only from Madrid, Gran Canaria, or Tenerife Norte, the three routes Pamplona Airport currently operates. There is no direct international flight to Pamplona from outside Spain. Travelers coming from Europe or further afield need to connect through Madrid or another Spanish hub, or consider flying into Bilbao or San Sebastián instead and traveling to Pamplona by road or rail.
What airlines fly to Pamplona Airport?
Two airlines currently serve PNA: Iberia, which operates the Madrid route, and Binter Canarias, which flies to Gran Canaria and Tenerife Norte. Iberia has historically also run a seasonal service to Ibiza, though that route is not listed among the airport’s current regular destinations as of this writing.
Is Pamplona Airport getting new routes in 2026?
Not yet, despite the government’s public plans. A December 2025 tender aimed at attracting new international and domestic airlines to Pamplona drew no bids at all. The regional government has since scaled back its ambitions to two new domestic routes, expected to be Andalucía and Barcelona, with a fresh tender planned for later in 2026. As of this writing, none of it has translated into an actual new flight.
How do you get from Pamplona Airport into the city?
By car, metered taxi, or a reservation-based shared taxi running between the airport and Paseo Sarasate. There is currently no public bus service to the airport; a city bus route operated from 2017 to roughly 2019 but was cancelled due to low use and has not been reinstated.
How far is Pamplona Airport from the city center?
About six kilometers, roughly a ten to fifteen minute drive under normal traffic. The airport sits near the village of Noaín, just south of Pamplona, which makes it one of the closer regional airports to its host city, even though the lack of a public bus means most travelers still need a car or taxi to cover that short distance.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.