Ask almost anyone on Calle Estafeta why a million people tie a red neckerchief around their necks every July and you will hear the same story: the pañuelo rojo represents the blood of San Fermín, the martyred first bishop of Pamplona, decapitated in the third century. It is a tidy story, and nearly every English-language article about the fiesta repeats it as settled fact. The documented record says something far more interesting. The white-and-red uniform of Sanfermines is a twentieth-century invention, created by a single working-class peña in the sanfermines of 1930, and the martyr’s-blood explanation is a legend that attached itself to the outfit afterward.
This matters because the real history of the pañuelo rojo at San Fermín is a better story than the myth. The myth gives you a religious emblem frozen in time. The record gives you a city arguing about how its young men dressed, a mayor issuing decrees against costume-like clothing, a club of working men who solved the problem with cheap white fabric and a red scarf, and a tradition so successful that within a generation the whole city had copied it. Believing the myth means missing the actual moment a global icon was born.
What follows is built from the primary record: the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own account of the festival outfit, the history published by the Asociación de Empresarios de Hostelería y Turismo de Navarra at sanfermines.net, and hemeroteca research by the Navarran historian Miguel Izu published in the Diario de Noticias de Navarra, which traced the uniform’s first appearance in the pages of La Voz de Navarra to July 1930.
The Ritual: From the Txupinazo to the Pobre de Mí
The rules of the pañuelo are unwritten but universally observed. Before noon on July 6, the scarf stays off your neck. In the packed Plaza Consistorial, the crowd holds its pañuelos aloft as the clock approaches midday, and the instant the txupinazo rocket (also written in Spanish as chupinazo) fires from the Ayuntamiento balcony, everyone ties the scarf around their neck. It stays there for nine days. It comes off only at midnight on July 14, during the Pobre de Mí, the candlelit closing ceremony where Pamplona sings that the fiesta is over.
The rest of the outfit frames it. The Ayuntamiento de Pamplona describes the full uniform as a white shirt and white trousers, a red faja tied at the waist, and the red neckerchief, with white espadrilles crossed by red ribbon as the traditional footwear. The faja is a serious piece of cloth: roughly 2.5 meters long and 12 centimeters wide, wrapped tightly and knotted at the side. Pañuelos are commonly embroidered, with the coat of arms of Pamplona or Navarra, the shield of a peña or club, or the owner’s name, a custom especially common on the small pañuelicos given to children. Many pamplonicas keep the same scarf for decades.
1930: A Crackdown on Costumes and the Peña That Answered It
The uniform was born out of a dress-code fight. Through the late 1920s, Pamplona’s newspapers ran increasingly severe complaints that the cuadrillas of young men were turning the fiesta into what Diario de Navarra in June 1930 called a “carnavalada,” with clashing colored shirts and outlandish costumes. In 1930 the mayor, Francisco Javier Arvizu Aguado, summoned representatives of the cuadrillas to his office, issued a municipal decree banning clothing whose “clearly outlandish character gives the appearance of a costume,” and even wrote to the Chamber of Commerce asking fabric merchants to stop selling the offending cloth.
Into that argument stepped Peña La Veleta, a club founded around 1929 whose members were, in the words of the sanfermines.net history, mostly humble, working-class men. They wanted a uniform that would identify the group, and they chose white garments because white was cheap, easy to find, and striking, made more striking still by a red pañuelo and faja. The Navarran historian Miguel Izu, working through the newspaper archives, found photographs by Gerardo Zaragüeta published in La Voz de Navarra on July 11 and 12 of 1930 showing La Veleta’s mozos already dressed in white and red, a full year earlier than the 1931 date most accounts cite. In 1931 the Ayuntamiento ran a competition to reward the best-behaved and most decorously dressed cuadrillas, and La Veleta took the top prize actually awarded, since the jury left first place vacant. City Hall, which a year earlier had been threatening fabric merchants, was now handing prize money to the men in white and red.
The Colors Were Old. The Uniform Was New.
None of this means La Veleta invented white and red from nothing. The combination was already traditional dress for txistularis, dantzaris, pelotaris, and the mulilleros who work the plaza, and the 1930 fiesta poster by Gerardo Lizarraga featured a musician dressed in white and red. What La Veleta did that no one had done before, as Izu’s research makes clear, was adopt it as a uniform for every mozo in the peña.
The idea spread almost immediately. The peña Gau Txori appears photographed in the same white-and-red dress in La Voz de Navarra in July 1931, and La Jarana shows up in white by July 1932. From there the outfit worked its way outward for decades, from the peñas to the cuadrillas to the general public, until, as the sanfermines.net history puts it, from approximately the 1960s onward it was worn by essentially everyone at the fiesta. Today it is the near-obligatory dress of Sanfermines and of summer fiestas across much of Navarra. The full breakdown of each piece, and what runners specifically wear on the route, is on our Pamplona uniform page.
So Where Does the Saint’s Blood Story Come From?
The martyrdom explanation is real, in the sense that it genuinely circulates in Pamplona and has for a long time. San Fermín, according to tradition Pamplona’s first bishop, was decapitated in Amiens in the third century, and the red at the throat is said to recall his blood. But the sanfermines.net history is careful to present this as one explanation among several that coexist, noting that “there is no agreement on the matter,” and offering the resemblance to the red of the Navarrese flag as a rival theory. The Ayuntamiento’s own page on the outfit does not mention the martyrdom at all. It simply calls the origin unknown and credits La Veleta with popularizing the colors. The saint’s own documentary record is thinner than most visitors assume, a problem we examined in our investigation of San Fermín’s historicity.
There is also a quiet, decisive piece of evidence against a single religious meaning: not every pañuelo in Pamplona is red. Peña La Única wears green. La Jarana and Txako wear blue. The scarves function first as marks of identity and belonging, to a peña, to a club, to a family, to the city itself. The red one simply became universal because the uniform it belonged to did. Several of the 17 peñas of San Fermín still signal their identity precisely by departing from it.
What Visitors Should Know
Buy a real pañuelo in Pamplona rather than packing a substitute. They are sold across the Casco Viejo in the days before the fiesta, plain or embroidered with the arms of Pamplona or Navarra, and a name can be embroidered while you wait at several shops. Do not tie it on before the rocket fires on July 6. Locals notice, and holding it overhead in the plaza while the crowd chants is the point of being there. Wear it for the full nine days, take it off at the Pobre de Mí if you stay to the end, and keep it. A pañuelo with some years on it is one of the few souvenirs in Pamplona that money cannot actually buy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people wear red scarves at San Fermín?
The red pañuelo is part of the traditional white-and-red outfit of Sanfermines. The popular explanation is that the red recalls the blood of the martyred San Fermín, but the historical record shows the outfit was created as a peña uniform in 1930 by Peña La Veleta and spread from there. The martyrdom story is a legend attached to the outfit later, one of several explanations that circulate, alongside the red of the Navarrese flag.
When do you put on the pañuelo at San Fermín?
At noon on July 6, the moment the txupinazo rocket fires from the Ayuntamiento balcony. Before that, the custom is to hold it overhead in the crowd. It is then worn continuously until midnight on July 14, when it is removed during the Pobre de Mí closing ceremony.
What does the red pañuelo symbolize?
There is no single agreed meaning. Tradition offers the blood of San Fermín, decapitated in Amiens in the third century. Others point to the red of the Navarrese flag. In practice the pañuelo is an identity marker: peñas, clubs, and families embroider their own shields and names on it, and some peñas wear green or blue scarves instead of red.
Where does the white and red San Fermín outfit come from?
From Peña La Veleta, a working-class Pamplona peña that adopted white clothing with red pañuelo and faja as its uniform. Newspaper photographs published in La Voz de Navarra date its first appearance to the sanfermines of 1930. Other peñas copied it within two years, and by the 1960s it had become the de facto dress of the entire fiesta.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.