At eight in the morning on Tuesday 7 July 2026, six fighting bulls will be released from the corral at the bottom of Calle Santo Domingo in Pamplona. They won't run alone: steers will travel with them, and hundreds of runners will be testing how close they can get to animals that weigh well over half a tonne. The first encierro of San Fermín 2026 will set the pattern for eight consecutive mornings in a city of about 200,000 residents that by that hour will already be crowded beyond its usual shape.
San Fermín opens every year at noon on 6 July with the chupinazo, the rocket fired from the Casa Consistorial. The encierro itself waits until the next morning and then runs daily through 14 July. In 2026, 6 July is a Monday, so the first bull run falls on Tuesday 7 July and the last on Tuesday 14 July. That short gap matters for weekend travellers: anyone arriving just for the first weekend will see the opening act and two mornings of bulls before the event even reaches its midpoint.
Ernest Hemingway gave those dates their global reach. A century after he wrote about Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises, the encierro still carries the mixture of ritual and danger he found there. What the novel compressed into atmosphere has since become a heavily administered event: barriers, medical posts, animal welfare inspections, television timings, and a written set of runner rules that the city updates each year.
2026 Route, Rules and Safety: What to Know Before You Run
The 2026 calendar and daily rhythm
The chupinazo at noon on Monday 6 July is the festival's formal ignition. In Pamplona, the red pañuelo, or neckerchief, is not tied until the rocket has gone off; before that, the white-and-red crowd holds them in the air. The first encierro starts at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday 7 July. Municipal workers set the barriers and clear the cobbles, police seal access points before daylight, medical teams place stretchers and note the weather, and the run itself occupies only a few minutes after the bulls are released.
Each day follows an old sequence: the run in the morning, the procession of Saint Fermín through the old town, the afternoon corrida in the Plaza de Toros, and the international fireworks competition at night. The closing act, Pobre de Mí, comes at midnight on 14 July with candles in the streets and a collective singing that ends the nine-day fiesta. Visitors who want a quieter version of the city can find it in the hours after lunch, when the processional and civic events thin the crowd in the narrow streets near the cathedral.
The route from Santo Domingo to the bullring
The encierro course runs roughly 875 metres from the corralillos on the Santo Domingo slope to the bullring. Runners enter the course early and are held behind barriers at several points until the first rocket signals that the bulls have left the pen. A second rocket means all six bulls and the steers are on the street; a third and fourth announce the entry to the ring and the conclusion inside it.
The route passes the Plaza Consistorial, turns onto Calle Mercaderes, then enters the long straight of Estafeta, where many runners find the most room to run. The hardest sections are the narrow turn before Mercaderes and the final curve at Telefónica. The callejón, the funnel into the bullring, is one of the most dangerous places on the course because the crowd compresses just as the bulls overtake the slower runners.
Who can run, and what the rules actually say
Running is open to anyone who is 18 or older, but the city's rules exclude people who arrive drunk or under the influence of drugs. Police can remove a runner before the start or from the course during the run. The rules also prohibit running with backpacks, cameras, phones, or any object that can drop and trip the people behind you. Running shoes are required; sandals and flip-flops are not permitted. You may not touch, hit, kick, or distract the bulls, and you may not hide in doorways, block the barriers, climb onto them, or stop in the middle of the course.
The advice for a fall is counterintuitive but consistent: if you go down, cover your head with your hands and stay down rather than trying to stand in front of the pack. The official guidance also tells runners to stand in a doorway or against the barrier if they cannot maintain speed, and to leave the course when the run passes them. First-time runners are generally told to enter on the Estafeta and move to the right-hand side, where the pace is more forgiving than at the start.
The risk picture: falls, gorings, and medical response
Most casualties in the encierro are not caused by horns. Falls and pile-ups, along with runners tripping over each other, account for the largest share of the injuries that the Red Cross and Navarra health staff treat each morning. A goring, when it happens, is often severe because the fighting bulls weigh up to about 600 kilograms and move in a tight group. The city maintains medical posts along the route and runs a specific emergency protocol for the encierro, with ambulances positioned at access points.
The historical toll is small but real: since record-keeping began in 1924, at least 15 people have died in the run. The most recent fatal goring in the encierro occurred in 2009, when a 27-year-old runner from Madrid was struck in the neck near the Telefónica curve. That death prompted renewed debate about crowd density, route bottlenecks, and whether first-time visitors should be allowed to run without any formal briefing. No major reform followed, but the city has since increased its public information campaigns and its shared tracking of injury data.
Animal welfare and the afternoon corrida
The bulls that run each morning do not leave the festival together. In the afternoon, they are killed in the corrida in the Plaza de Toros, a fact that sits at the centre of the event's public argument. Animal-rights organisations, including PETA and AnimaNaturalis, have targeted San Fermín as one of the most visible displays of bullfighting, and protesters have staged their own anti-bullfight action in the same city during the fiesta. Supporters respond that the encierro and the corrida are distinct cultural institutions in Navarra, protected by local tradition and regulated under Spanish law.
Navarra's relationship with the bullfight is more complicated than the postcard version suggests. Bullfighting remains legal and central to San Fermín, even as animal welfare rules have tightened the transport and veterinary checks on the animals used in the run. The official city programme includes those protections, though critics argue that no amount of regulation removes the harm built into the event. Visitors should expect the debate to be visible on the streets in July, in news reports, and in the public discussions outside the Plaza de Toros.
Practical planning for first-time visitors
Accommodation in Pamplona fills months in advance, and much of it is taken before spring. Trains from Madrid and Barcelona arrive at Pamplona station, and bus services from San Sebastián and other Basque cities run frequently during the fiesta. Pamplona also has a small airport at Noáin, though many visitors fly to Bilbao or Barcelona and continue by train. The official tourism board of Navarra publishes a San Fermín section with route maps, safety guidance, event times, and live broadcast details at turismo.navarra.es.
If you want to watch rather than run, the city rents balconies along the route, but those sell out early and are not cheap. The free option is to line the barriers before 7:00 a.m., though the best positions go to people who arrive much earlier. RTVE and other channels broadcast the encierro live each morning, and many hotels show the run on screens for guests who prefer not to test the crowd. The Pamplona City Council's official site, pamplona.es, carries the updated programme and any last-minute changes to route access or security.
No visitor should enter the course without watching at least one encierro first. The city's own advice says as much, and the injury data bears it out: the people most likely to be hurt are those who have never seen the run from behind the barriers and treat it as a bucket-list sprint. Live broadcasts now put the falls in slow motion before a global audience, which has made the safety debate more insistent even as demand keeps growing. The event's future safety improvements will likely come from measuring how many first-timers arrive already knowing the rules, rather than from counting how many show up.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash