San Fermín Doesn’t Run on One Daily Schedule. It Runs on Four.

Most guides to the San Fermín daily schedule describe a single template and apply it to all nine days: a wake-up band before dawn, the encierro at 8am, pintxos and vermú through the midday lull, fireworks at 11pm. That template is real, but it only describes six of the nine days. July 6 has no bull run of any kind. July 7 is the only day that combines the very first encierro with a full religious procession through the old town, on a fixed, minute-by-minute liturgical route almost no visitor guide bothers to lay out. July 14 has no 11pm fireworks as its final act at all; the display is deliberately moved earlier to clear the way for a solemn midnight ceremony that ends the festival entirely.

This matters because people plan their trip around the wrong day. A visitor who arrives expecting an encierro on the morning of July 6, the festival’s opening day, will stand on an empty street. Someone who treats July 7 as just another running day will miss the only procession of the festival, timed to the minute and gone by early afternoon. And anyone assuming the fireworks always cap the night will be confused on July 14, when the sky show comes an hour earlier than usual and the real ending happens at midnight in near silence, with candles instead of rockets.

This piece draws on the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own tourism office pages for the festival’s practical schedule and encierro logistics, the city council’s published account of the closing day’s traditions, including the documented 1301 origin of the Octava de San Fermín, and cross-verified Spanish regional press coverage of the July 7 procession’s exact route and timing. Where a single tradition, the dianas, the Riau-Riau, the toro de fuego, already has its own deep dive on this site, this article links out to it rather than repeating it. What follows is the chronological skeleton connecting all of them: not one San Fermín schedule, but four.

Day One, July 6: The Day With No Encierro

The single most common mistake in San Fermín trip planning is assuming the festival’s opening day includes a bull run. It does not. The encierro runs exactly eight times, from July 7 through July 14, and July 6 is not one of them.

Instead, July 6 has its own entirely separate rhythm. Locals gather in their cuadrillas, informal friend groups, around 9am for an early snack, often fried eggs with serrano ham and piquillo peppers, ahead of the day’s real event: the txupinazo. At noon, a rocket is launched from the Ayuntamiento balcony overlooking the Plaza Consistorial, and the plaza detonates into a sea of red pañuelos, sprayed wine, and noise. This is the moment San Fermín actually begins, and it is worth being in the plaza itself, or in the packed side streets and bars with the balcony broadcast on, to feel it.

The afternoon slows down deliberately. At 1pm, a folk dance exhibition fills the Plaza de los Fueros, and by mid-afternoon the city has shifted into vermú hour, drinks and small plates before a long, unhurried lunch. Around 5pm comes one of the festival’s stranger traditions: the Riau-Riau, a slow civic procession from the Ayuntamiento toward the Capilla de San Fermín that has a long, contentious history of being deliberately delayed by the crowd. It happens exactly once, on this day, and never again during the festival.

Fireworks close the night at 11pm near La Ciudadela, the same nightly slot they will occupy on most other evenings of the festival. But nothing about July 6 resembles the “standard” San Fermín day most visitors expect. There is no diana at dawn, because there is no encierro the next morning to wake up for on the usual schedule, and no morning run to plan around at all.

Day Two, July 7: The Only Day With Both a First Run and a Procession

July 7 carries double weight. It is the feast day of Pamplona’s patron saint, and it is also the morning of the first encierro of the festival, the two facts that make this the single busiest, most layered day of the nine.

The day starts before the sun is fully up. At 6:45am, La Pamplonesa, the city’s traditional municipal band, plays the dianas, a rotating set of four traditional scores, through the streets of the Casco Viejo, waking the city and gathering runners toward Santo Domingo. At 8am sharp, the first encierro of the festival departs, covering 848.6 meters from the Santo Domingo corrals through the Plaza Consistorial, Mercaderes, and Estafeta to the Bull Ring, in roughly two minutes. Afterward, breakfast is close to mandatory: churros dipped in hot chocolate, or fried eggs with txistorra (the Navarran sausage, known in Spanish as chistorra), is the traditional way to recover.

What makes July 7 different from every other running day is what happens mid-morning. Starting around 10am, the city’s Corporation and the Cathedral chapter gather to begin the Procesión de San Fermín, the only religious procession of the entire festival. The saint’s image leaves the Iglesia de San Lorenzo at approximately 10:30 to 10:35am, moving via Calle Taconera toward the Rincón de la Aduana. By 11:10am it reaches the Plaza del Consejo, where a local choir sings a jota in the saint’s honor. At 11:30am, at the Pocico de San Cernin, two children place roses at the image while txistularis, players of the traditional Basque flute, perform “Agur Jaunak.” The image returns to the Capilla de San Fermín by 12:05pm, where Mass begins. No other day of San Fermín includes anything like it.

By 9:30am, the Comparsa, the parade of Gigantes and Cabezudos, is already moving through a different route than it will take on any other day of the festival, since the route changes daily. The rest of July 7 settles into what will, with minor variation, repeat for the next several days: pintxos, a long lunch, and an evening that builds toward the peña-driven street life the festival is known for.

Days Three Through Eight: The Template Everyone Mistakes for the Whole Festival

This is the stretch of the festival that actually matches the generic “daily schedule” most articles describe, and it is worth being precise about exactly which days that applies to: July 8 through 13, six days, not nine.

Each of these mornings follows the same skeleton. The dianas move through the Casco Viejo at 6:45am. The encierro departs at 8am, the bulls covering the same 848.6-meter route in around two minutes. Almost immediately after, the vaquillas, young heifers with their horns padded, are released into the Bull Ring one at a time for anyone willing to test their nerve against recortes, the acrobatic evasive footwork that is a recognized sport in its own right and has nothing to do with bullfighting. Breakfast follows, and by mid-morning the Comparsa is moving through that day’s specific route.

At noon, the Paseo de Sarasate hosts a daily recital of traditional jota music, performed by rotating bands from Navarra and neighboring regions, a fixture of the mid-festival stretch that gets far less attention than the encierro but runs every single one of these days without fail. Lunch, ideally at a peña’s own dining hall if you can get an invitation, runs long and loud, typically ending in music and dancing rather than a quiet coffee.

Evenings during this stretch belong to the peñas and to the toro de fuego, a fire-rigged frame run through the crowded streets near Santo Domingo by a single runner, chased and dodged rather than feared, since there is no actual animal involved. Fireworks close the night at 11pm near La Ciudadela, the same slot as July 6 and most other evenings. This is the only genuinely repeatable block of the nine-day festival, and even then, the Comparsa’s specific route and the day’s assigned herd of bulls change daily.

Day Nine, July 14: No Fireworks Finale. A Funeral for the Festival Instead.

The last day breaks the pattern completely, starting with the fact that it has no true closing spectacle at 11pm the way the middle days do.

The morning still opens with the day’s encierro, the eighth and final one of the festival. But by late morning, the tone shifts hard toward ceremony. At 11am, the Capilla de San Fermín hosts La Octava de San Fermín, a formal Mass whose roots trace back to a 1301 diocesan synod convened by Bishop Miguel Périz de Legaria, and whose specific tradition of city council participation dates to 1689, a year the council redirected the funds it would have spent on bullfights, fireworks, and dances toward a sung Mass and sermon instead, during a period of mourning for the queen. At midday, the Comparsa, out since 9:30am as on every other day, performs one final round of dances in the Plaza Consistorial before the Gigantes and Cabezudos formally say goodbye to the city’s children until the following year.

In the early evening, around 6pm, the Kalejira de las Culturas, a procession celebrating Pamplona’s cultural diversity, departs from Calle Descalzos and winds through the Casco Antiguo, reaching the Plaza del Castillo by roughly 8:30pm. At 9:45pm, the toro de fuego makes its final run of the festival down the Cuesta de Santo Domingo.

Fireworks still happen, but an hour earlier than the rest of the festival, specifically so the display finishes with time to spare before midnight. Because at midnight, in the Plaza Consistorial, San Fermín actually ends: the crowd sings “Pobre de Mi,” red pañuelos come untied from around thousands of necks, candles are lit instead of rockets fired, and the mayor announces the close of the festival from the Ayuntamiento balcony with the traditional line “ya falta menos,” already less time until next year’s San Fermín. There is no equivalent moment on any of the other eight days.

What Never Changes

Strip away the three days that break the pattern, July 6, July 7, and July 14, and the constants across the remaining stretch are genuinely few: the 6:45am dianas, the 8am encierro, the daily noon jota recital on the Paseo de Sarasate, and fireworks at 11pm. Everything else, the Comparsa’s route, the specific ceremonies layered on top, even the tone of the crowd, shifts from one day to the next. Anyone building a San Fermín trip around a single mental model of “a typical day” is planning around a version of the festival that is only actually true for about two thirds of it.

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Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.