The capital of Navarre, one of the regions of the Basque Country.
Wow! This city was a surprise! We’ve both travelled extensIvely throughout the world, including Spain, but nowhere have we seen the streets packed with generations of party-goers like we did at 5pm on Saturday afternoon.
At first we felt a bit vulnerable amidst the loud drunken festivities, but after a while we could feel there was no danger, it’s just the way of the Pamplona people. They are dark-haired, dark-skinned, loud, swarthy and brash, and no matter their age or gender, they all carry a plastic glass of alcohol as they walk through the streets of Pamplona. Corners of roads seemed to attract huge crowds, so you ended up doing detours to avoid them.
We googled to see if there was a special event taking place, but the only fiesta mentioned was Sanfermin and the Running of the Bulls, la Corrida de Toros, along Calle Estafeta, and that takes place in July, not September. So we are left with the impression that this is a regular weekend pixx-up, which sadly we didn’t feel like joining.
The Basque language is like no other, it’s certainly nothing like Spanish or French. It has some very long words with t’s, x’s and z’s in. Pamplona is Iruna, tapas are pintxos, hello is kaixo…
We’ve read that the difficult Basque language is the cause of their relative isolation over the millennia, and this could be the reason for their genetic makeup being dissimilar to the rest of the Iberian peninsular. We were certainly surprised by their appearance.
Instead of joining the drunken masses, we did what the rest of the tourists do – visited the cathedral, the museum, the bronze sculpture of the Corrida, and had a drink in a Hemingway haunt- Cafe Iruna.
