Pamplona
"Everyone asks about the bulls. Nobody asks about the sixteenth-century walls, which is Pamplona's real inheritance."
A walled Navarrese capital that spends eleven months a year being calm and civic, and one week each July being famous for a reason that has nothing to do with either.
I went to Pamplona in March specifically to avoid the bulls, which felt at first like visiting Venice specifically to avoid the water, but it turned out to be the better decision. Without the July crush of the Sanfermines — the nine days of running with bulls down Calle Estafeta that Hemingway made famous in The Sun Also Rises and that now draw a million visitors to a city of barely 200,000 — Pamplona reveals itself as something quieter and, to me, more interesting: a serious, handsome Navarrese capital built almost entirely inside a ring of Renaissance-era fortifications.
The Ciudadela, the star-shaped citadel begun under Felipe II in the 1570s, is the best of it. Its bastions and moats now hold a public park rather than a garrison, all grass and gravel paths and modern sculpture set against sandstone ramparts, and I spent a whole grey afternoon just walking its perimeter, trying to work out the logic of the pentagonal defenses. Pamplona’s walls, largely intact along the northern and eastern edges of the old town, once made it one of the most heavily fortified cities in Spain — a frontier capital of the Kingdom of Navarre, which existed as its own sovereign entity for centuries before formal union with Castile in 1512, a fact locals will mention more than once if you give them the opening.
Estafeta Without the Crowd
Walking Calle Estafeta on an ordinary day, with delivery vans double-parked and old men reading newspapers at café tables instead of thousands of runners and bulls, gave me a strange doubled vision of the street — I kept picturing the photographs I’d seen layered over the empty pavement. The Plaza del Castillo, the grand arcaded square at the heart of the old town, is where the real life of the city happens year-round: the Café Iruña, open since 1888 and one of Hemingway’s known haunts, still serves vermouth under its belle-époque mirrors to a crowd that’s mostly local.
Cathedral and Kingdom
The Catedral de Santa María la Real sits at the highest point of the old town, its neoclassical facade hiding a Gothic interior that most art historians consider finer than the exterior lets on — an unusual mismatch that apparently divided opinion even when the facade went up in the 1780s. Inside, the alabaster tomb of King Carlos III of Navarre and his queen lies at the center of the nave, a reminder that this city was a royal capital in its own right long before it was a Spanish provincial one. The adjoining cloister, one of the most complete Gothic cloisters in Spain, was nearly empty when I visited, just me and a caretaker sweeping fallen leaves off eight-hundred-year-old stone.
Navarre’s food culture runs through Pamplona too — this is pintxos country as much as San Sebastián is, just less internationally hyped for it, and I ate better and cheaper along Calle San Nicolás than almost anywhere else in northern Spain, working through plates of chistorra sausage and stuffed piquillo peppers with a glass of the region’s underrated rosado.
When to go: May and June bring green surroundings and mild temperatures before the July Sanfermines chaos; if you specifically want the bull-running festival, arrive several days early to secure lodging, as the city fills completely.