Two decades under the horns: the unlikely durability of Pamplona's running of the bulls

On 7 July 2026, at 08:00 sharp, Bill Hillmann, an English professor at Loyola University Chicago, joined roughly a thousand other runners sprinting the 875 metres from the Santo Domingo corral up Calle Estafeta to the Plaza de Toros in Pamplona. For Hillmann, it was his twentieth consecutive encierro. He was not the oldest runner on the street, but he is among a small handful of Americans who have built a twenty-year record around a tradition that most tourists experience once, if at all. The run is short. The weather is usually fine. The bulls are heavy. None of those facts changes from one July to the next, and that is part of what keeps him coming back.

Hillmann first travelled to the festival in the summer of 2006, the year after finishing Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a teenager. The novel, which treats the running of the bulls as a rite of passage for American expatriates in 1920s Spain, gave him two ambitions at once: a career in literature, and the run itself. Two decades on, the first ambition has become a tenure-track position at Loyola's Chicago campus. The second has become a discipline, a set of rules he has refined so thoroughly that he now teaches the encierro as a case study in risk and ritual.

The rules he wrote so he could keep going

The morning encierro at San Fermín is, on paper, simple. Six fighting bulls, accompanied by six steers, run from a pen outside the old city through three narrow streets to the bullring. The route is less than a kilometre. The run typically takes between two and four minutes. Injuries, when they happen, are usually goring from the horns of a steer, a fall on the cobbles, or being trampled at the tight turn into the ring. Hillmann's survival across twenty years is not luck; it is the product of a rulebook he began drafting in his twenties and has rewritten annually.

According to his own published guidance, the central rules are almost ascetic: no alcohol the night before, no running the night before, no running after the bulls in the section before the curve into the ring, never approach a fallen runner, never touch a bull, never stop in the middle of the street, and treat the steers as more dangerous than the bulls because they move in packs and rarely break stride. He preaches a sober, almost clinical version of the event. The corrida itself, the afternoon bullfight, he treats separately and respectfully, as a separate cultural institution with its own ethics.

Why Pamplona, why every year

Spain's San Fermín draws roughly a million visitors across the nine days from 6 to 14 July, and the morning run is the festival's most photographed moment. The wider story is about cultural continuity in a country where regional traditions have been actively preserved and re-exported as soft power. Hemingway's 1926 novel did not invent the encierro, records of bull-running in Pamplona stretch back centuries, but it fixed the event in the international imagination and seeded a steady stream of foreign runners that has not abated. Hillmann is part of that lineage, though he is also its most self-conscious student.

His academic work and his festival participation now reinforce each other. He has written about the run, lectured about it, and appeared in documentaries; he is, in effect, a long-running case study in how a single person can internalise a foreign ritual without romanticising it. Where many foreign runners describe the experience in the language of transformation, Hillmann describes it in the language of hazard analysis: where to position the body at the curve into the plaza, how to read the gait of a tired bull, when to sprint and when to slow down. The twentieth year matters to him not as a milestone but as data.

What the festival actually is

San Fermín is named for the city's patron saint, a third-century martyr who was, by tradition, killed by being dragged by bulls. The festival's religious and civic dimensions predate Hemingway by roughly fifteen centuries, and the encierro is the morning preamble to the afternoon corrida. The bulls that run in the morning are the same bulls that fight in the afternoon, and most of them die in the ring the same day. The run, in other words, is not a sporting event in the conventional sense; it is the opening movement of a longer, and much older, ritual of which the public sees only the start.

That structural fact is part of what makes the encierro hard to discuss in shorthand. Animal-welfare organisations argue against the corrida on ethical grounds, and by extension against the morning run that supplies the animals to the ring. The regional government of Navarra, where Pamplona sits, has defended the tradition as cultural heritage and resisted repeated attempts to restrict or ban it. The debate runs in parallel to similar arguments in Catalonia and parts of southern France, where corridas have been either banned or curtailed in recent years. Hillmann's position, as he has described it, is that the run and the fight are separable in his own practice even if they are linked in the festival's formal architecture.

What remains uncertain

Two decades of clean runs do not make the encierro safe. Several runners are gored each year, and the death toll across the festival's history runs into double digits. The morning is unpredictable in ways that a rulebook cannot fully tame. Hillmann's discipline lowers his statistical exposure; it does not eliminate the underlying hazard, and he would be the first to say so. The other open question is whether Pamplona itself will look the same in another twenty years. Spanish regional politics, the economics of small-press bullfighting, and shifting tourist flows all bear on the festival's future. The run survives, but the conditions under which it survives are not static.

For now, the twentieth run is logged. The horns come again next July.

This piece was written from a single NPR feature on Bill Hillmann's two-decade record at the San Fermín encierro. Where the original reporting did not specify a number, an institutional detail, or a quoted remark, this article did not supply one. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is named because the NPR piece names it; no other book or film about Pamplona is referenced here.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_of_the_bulls
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ferm%C3%ADn
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamplona