The festival in honor of the city saint San Fermín in Pamplona took place for the first time since 2019. The spectacle is not entirely harmless.
Pamplona – At the end of the traditional and controversial bull races of the “Sanfermines” festival, six runners were seriously injured in Spain.
One of the men was taken on the horns by a bull during the eighth and last bull hunt in Pamplona in the north of the country on Thursday, the state television broadcaster RTVE reported, citing the organizers. But after the first treatment, he was fine, it said. Another five runners were taken to the hospital with injuries such as bruises and broken bones.
The festival in honor of the city saint San Fermín took place for the first time since 2019. It was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the corona pandemic. The bull hunt is broadcast live by several broadcasters. On a total of eight days, six fighting bulls, some of them weighing more than 600 kilograms, and several tame lead oxen were chased through the narrow streets of the old town in the early morning for the bullfights in the evening to the arena. A total of 50 runners were slightly more seriously injured. Some of the injured were impaled on the buttocks and genitals, among other things, and some were still in the hospital after several days.
Animal rights activists protest
Animal rights activists are not worried about the runners, but about the bulls. Also this year they protested against the event, which is meanwhile also controversial in Spain. Activists carried placards reading “Bullfighting is prehistoric”. According to animal rights activists, the bulls are tortured by the hunt. And that’s not all: in the evenings they are killed by toreros during bullfights in the arena to the cheers of the spectators.
Despite this, the festival continues to attract crowds of tourists from all over the world, especially from Europe, Australia and the USA. According to initial estimates, the 200,000-inhabitant city of Pamplona was visited by a million people from home and abroad on the occasion of this year’s “Sanfermines”. The US author Ernest Hemingway, among others, wrote about Pamplona in his first major novel “Fiesta” (1926). dpa
