I am taking it easy today, so I woke up late-ish (7 am), and took time over my morning coffee before going out into the world. Pamplona was built on a bluff overseeing the Arga River, but has since expanded to the flood plain, so one could speak of a High town and a Low town. The Low town has a lot of green spaces, sport and recreational facilities, and industry, so you can see that Pamplona is trying to be flood-resilient. One of the unique sports facilities are frontones, 3-sided wall enclosures where people practice hand-ball and jai-alai. The latter could be called hand-basket ball, and is one of the fastest and most dangerous sports you could imagine. Two (or four players) with helmets and hand-baskets (a type of curved narrow basket that is securely strapped to the right hand), hurl a very hard rubber ball with their curbed basket against the wall, at crazy speeds taking advantage of the centrifugal force, and the opposite team has to catch it and hurl it back after only one bounce. The players, or pelotaris, bounce high on the walls of the frontón to sweep the ball into their baskets and hurl it back to the opponent, and the game seems to go faster and faster as the back-and-forth between the players builds up. Mind you, this is a very hard ball, so if a pelotari miscalculates and gets hit it can lead to serious injury. However, like in baseball, in jai-alai the pelotari has to respect the ball but not fear it; deep inside they want to grab that ball and send it back to the wall!
Climbing from the Low city to the Upper old town one goes through the city ramparts, which in theory protected it from attack from the riverfront. The High town is where most of the public buildings and old town are located. The cathedral is nice, but cannot hold a candle to the cathedral in Burgos. In the nearby Church of San Lorenzo is the Chapel of San Ferrmín, who happens to be the patron saint of Pamplona. He lived back there in the First Century, converted from the pagan religion of the Basques to Christianity, and eventually became the First Bishop of the Roman city of Pamplona (whatever its name might had been). Eventually he felt the need to go to Palestine (bad move), where he was executed by Herod, at the height of the first persecution of the Christians, circa 60 AD, to become a martyr. He used to be celebrated in October, but some entrepreneurial spirit figured out that his feast day could be moved to July 6, right at the time the bullocks were being driven down from the Pyrenees to market, so one could have a week-long celebration as La Fiesta de San Fermín, and reap significant profits from it. Somewhere in the XVII century, the driving of the young bullocks through the town, challenged the young locals to tease the bulls to start a stampede, so pretty soon you had screaming people trying (without much success) to get to safety before being trampled. Nowadays, La Fiesta de San Fermín, includes a week-long series of events, among which is letting the bullocks (some of them would be full-grown bulls) run down the street everyday for the whole week, while the crazies run with the bulls, swatting them with rolled newspapers if they get too close. They do this every day for a week, but on any occasion the maximum number of bulls that run are between six and ten (we don't want anyone to get hurt, do we?)
Hey Muriel, perhaps they could do the same thing with the fat horses of the High Pyrenees, and have them run through the streets of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, scattering away peregrinos in panic! That would add a twist to El Camino.
The Pamplona running of the bulls greatly inspired journalist Ernest Hemingway to write his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises", in which, in his very direct writing style, he draws the reader into the run of the bulls and the harsh Fiesta Brava (the Bull Fight).
No comments:
Post a Comment