Key Points
- Thousands of revellers are celebrating the return of Pamplona's famous bull-running festival.
- But animal rights groups are calling for the event to be banned for good.
Thousands of revellers are celebrating the return of Pamplona's famous bull-running festival, but animal rights groups are calling for the event to be banned for good.
Festival participants in white clothes and red scarves filled the streets of Spain's Pamplona on Wednesday as the bang of a firecracker kicked off the first San Fermin bull-running festival since the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
On Tuesday, dozens of animal rights activists wearing dinosaur costumes protested in Pamplona, chanting: "Bullfighting is prehistoric!"
"Many tourists who come and do the bullrunning don't actually realise that the same bulls they are running down the cobbled streets with are later killed in the bullring that day," one protester said.
"They're stabbed over and over again for 20 minutes until they're dead, and it's incredibly cruel and painful for the bulls that go through this process."
The runs, during which six purpose-bred fighting bulls chase runners through the narrow streets of Pamplona's Old Quarter over a stretch of 800 metres, will start on Thursday and continue for a week, including the weekend, when they are usually the most dangerous because of larger crowds.
There are eight runs in total, with each usually lasting between three and five minutes.
They end at the bullring, where the animals are corralled before reappearing in the evening bullfight, when they are killed by professional matadors.
The festival is dangerous for humans too. At least 16 runners have lost their lives over the years, the last casualty being a man gored by a bull in 2009.
The event was made world-famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.
Before the pandemic made it impossible to hold in 2020 and 2021, it hadn't been suspended since the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
Pamplona's population of some 200,000 increases to nearly a million on peak days during the festival, especially over the weekend, including many foreigners.
Many visitors don't stop partying through the night or grab some sleep wherever they can outside.
