The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

crowds line the streets waiting for the encierro of the bulls, who will be sacrificed in the afternoon. The spectacle is awe-inspiring to Northerners, who are not accustomed to find themselves so near to fighting bulls. Once the rocket has been let off we hear in the distance the roar of the crowd which becomes louder and louder as the bulls race through the streets headed by the crowd of young men in white linen trousers, white hempen sandals with long red laces and a red handkerchief round the neck. The bulls dash like lightning through the streets, for every passage has been barricaded except the straight road towards the bullring. There is no chance of competing in speed with a fighting bull, for even the trained runners, who give themselves a generous handicap, find themselves in a few moments pressed by the racing bulls, and, as the animals approach the ring, the crowds of more timid runners conglomerate and there is pandemonium; for the bulls maddened by the shouting crowds stampede and charge over those who have fallen in the mêlée and gore those who block their way. They race on like an avalanche over the writhing mass of grovelling human beings.
    That year I was told, there were a number of serious casualties and I can well believe it, for the spectacle at the entrance to the ring was blood-curdling. When the bulls dashed into the ring the crowd followed them, and then began a savage kermesse of charging bulls, and steers jangling their cow bells, and men using their coats as capas to torear the bulls, and when the steers have led away the fighting bulls the crowd began spontaneously to dance the jota which, after the hair-raising encierro, becomes a war dance, and reminds me of the jotas I had seen danced by the mountaineers in Ansó and Jaca. In the afternoons of the festival week in 1943, among the bullfighters who took part in the corridas, there was the great Manolete, who that week reached the acme of his art. We used to meet him every evening in the smartest restaurant in Pamplona, nicknamed Las Siete Pocholas. Manolete was one of the most retiring and unaffected young men I have ever met: his physique was delicate, though wiry: his expression serious and full of the deepest melancholy, but occasionally in talking his face would suddenly light up into a wistful smile which transfigured him.
    “He is a Cordoban,” one of his friends told me, “and his style as a bull-fighter is serious, as it should be, seeing that he lives in the shadow of the Mosque of Córdoba.”
    The restaurant of the Siete Pocholas, which was the great social rendezvous in Pamplona, was so called because it was run by seven sisters all young and pretty, who started it during the Civil War in 1937: I used to go there regularly when I visited Pamplona in those years, and it was then a tiny establishment on the first floor of their present building. After the war they expanded their business and took over the complete ground floor and they now call their restaurant El Hostal del Rey Noble. I always consider those charming young sisters typical products of the new Spain which developed out of the tragic Spain of the Civil War, a Spain in which women play a far greater part than they did in the old days. The modern Spanish girl, like the seven sisters at Pamplona, when she is left in straitened circumstances is self-reliant, practical and full of courage and optimism.
    In Pamplona Cathedral one day I met four French pilgrims who had come on foot by Ostabat and Roncesvalles. One of them was a university professor and was able to quote long passages of the Chanson de Roland. They were a cheery group and were eager to hear my experiences on the other route by the Somport Pass. They had run into very bad weather after Ostabat, and had been drenched several times, with the result that two of them had very bad colds and the third was limping painfully, but they were stoical about their woes and placed all their faith in the leader of the party, the Professor, who was an expert mountain climber and hiker. The Professor wished to visit the Cathedral, for in the twelfth century it had been the Bishop of Pamplona who had founded the most famous of all hospices on the Road of St. James, that of Roncesvalles on the summit of the mountain, near the chapel of Charlemagne. The hospice was splendidly endowed by the King of Navarre, Garcia Ramirez, and it had, in addition to a hostel for the pilgrims, a hospital for the sick. The Professor, who