Every year on July 6, hundreds of thousands of people gather to participate in the nine-day festival in the northern city of Pamplona.
The culmination of the festival is the so-called running of the bulls, where bulls are released to run through the streets of the city. The challenge for the participants – an overwhelming majority of whom are men – is to avoid being barred.
Last year, 35 people were injured in connection with the bull rushes. The last fatality during the festival occurred in 2009, when a 27-year-old man was impaled in the neck by a horn.
Art form?
Calls to stop bull-running festivals have grown stronger in recent years.
Those who defend the events point to them as a Spanish tradition: the San Fermin festival is said to date back to the Middle Ages.
Bullfighting is an art form – and the bulls don’t suffer, are other arguments.
The opposing side emphasizes that the bulls do suffer, they claim that it is torture and underline that the argument “it is tradition” does not hold.
The bulls sent out in the rushes are killed later that day by bullfighters.
Medieval spectacle
Ahead of the festival, animal rights activists have gathered in Pamplona. Mimi Bekhechi, vice-president of the animal rights organization Peta, calls the bullfights a “medieval spectacle” and a “stain to Pamplona’s reputation”.
— Peta and all other decent people in Spain and elsewhere demand that the cruelty ends, she tells the newspaper Noticias de Navarre.
In terms of party politics, the issue has mainly been raised by the animal rights party Pacma, which in the 2019 Spanish parliamentary election received just over 1.3 percent of the vote.