The people of Pamplona are grateful to Hemingway for the publicity his book, “The Sun Also Rises,” brought the town. I found only a few who thought differently.
Hemingway often visited, the Cafe Iruña next to the Hotel La Perla where he stayed in later years after his success.
“He was a drunk,” one man said to me when asked about the statue of Hemingway in front of the bullring.
Hemingway is well liked by the people from Pamplona
Of course there is no shortage of references to stylish drink in Hemingway’s work. His love of cafe life is well-known and even celebrated in Pamplona I realized when later I found a bronze statue of Hemingway in the bar at the Cafe Iruña just beside his former digs, the Hotel La Perla.
Hemingway at the bar in the Cafe Iruna in bronze makes a good prop for tourist’s shots
The statue is a full-length bronze of Hemingway of the 1950s standing at the bar that he frequented. People were posing in front of the statue and rubbing the patina on the bronze to a shine.
The Plaza del Castillo was a haunt of Hemingway’s when he stayed at the Hotel la Perla, center, after he had been successful. In “The Sun Also Rises,” the hotel Quintana at the other end of the plaza was the lodging, called by Hemingway the Hotel Montoya in the book. .
Out front, at the Plaza del Castillo, there is a plaque that describes the nearby buildings that Hemingway frequented: Café Iruña, Café Torino, Bar Txotko, Hotel Quintana (the building is now the Cafe Tropicana and no longer a hotel), Hotel La Perla, Café Kutz (no longer a cafe), and Café Suizo. (no longer a cafe)
The cafe Iruña located on ‘The Rincon de Hemingway” looks out on the Plaza del Castillo
It is all part of the “Rincon de Hemingway,” a series of places, buildings and nearby towns that Hemingway visited between the 1923 and 1959, places that he wrote about.
A bronze sculpture depicting the running of the bulls during the festival San Fermín .
His second book about the bullfight culture of Spain was published in 1932, “Death In The Afternoon.” This book deals with death and courage in great detail with intricate descriptions of bullfighting and the exploration of the meaning of life.
“The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”
Hemingway became a master at describing the drama of death and the battle between man and animal and the battle of man to overcome fear. His blood-filled descriptions of the bull killing are legendary.
The running of the bulls takes place in July just outside this cafe where the bulls that will go into the arena that day are off-loaded and herded through the streets.
The running of the bulls in Pamplona occurs during the San Fermin Festival when the bulls that will go into the arena that day are brought to the vicinity of the arena and then off-loaded and herded up the cobble streets and into the bullring. Along the way young men and some not so young attempt to demonstrate their bravery by running in front of the bulls. Each year many runners are hurt due to falls and occasionally due to a goring by an angry bull. Fifteen have died since records were kept, the last one due to a goring in 2009.
Hemingway feared that his writing about the festival might bring change to the area and sure enough thousands have converged on the town each year and some factions in Pamplona would like to put an end to it. In fact Catalonia Spain outlawed bullfighting in January 2011.
The bulls run on these streets during Pamplona’s July festival.
The economic situation in Spain has hurt bullfighting and opened it to criticism while factions that oppose the ban are fighting back. Bullfighting in Spain is an ancient tradition with the running of the bulls in Pamplona going back at least 700 years. While Hemingway endeared himself to the people of Pamplona with his writing about their bull spectacle he may also have exposed their culture of bull fighting to criticism with his graphic descriptions of the blood sport. In fact the anti-bullfighting literature produced by people who would never attended a bullfight looks like deft paraphrasing lifted from the pages of, “Death In The Afternoon.”
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