In Search of Ernest Hemingway's Spain Remembering the Running of the Bulls in PamplonaPrepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International
I had a teacher once who knew everything about Spain. He knew about Madrid and Seville, and about another town he liked the most, a town called Pamplona.
He knew about having fun at the festivals (he used the Spanish word feria) and even about fishing in the Pyrenees, and he knew about fighting bulls. He could really make bull fighting come alive to us youngsters. He especially liked to tell about the running of the bulls during the feria in Pamplona, and the dancing in the streets that lasted the entire week during the festival.
And he knew all about the Spanish Civil War, about bridges being blown up and rebels hiding in caves in the mountains.
But the truth was, we later learned, our teacher had never been to Spain. Everything he knew about Spain came from reading Ernest Hemingway. Needless to say, he was a Hemingway fan.
It wasn’t only my teacher, but a whole generation, my generation, who grew up knowing all about Spain and never having gone there. We all read Hemingway or, if we hadn’t , we at least knew all about him and his lifestyle—following bull fights and hunting lions in Africa and fishing for trout in northern Spain.
Spain in those days was pretty much a closed book, and not too many visitors toured the country. That was before Royal Orchid Holidays, of course. Today one can find Hemingway’s Spain by joining ROHS52 for three days and two nights.
But, honestly, what was Hemingway’s Spain like? How much of it remains?
From foreign correspondent to short story writer to novelist, Hemingway wrote about Spain from when he first went there in 1923 until the year before his death in 1961. He wrote about all those things that so impressed my teacher and the rest of the world.
Hemingway came to know many of the would-be literary giants. While working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star he travelled widely throughout Italy, Switzerland, Germany and France. He had but three short stories to his credit when he went to Spain for a visit. Spain changed the course of his life.
“I had been down to Madrid in May working by myself,” he wrote in a letter home, “and I came by train from Bayonne to Juan-les-Pins third class and quite hungry because I had run out of money, stupidly, and had last eaten in Hendye at the French-Spanish border.”
Inspired by the country, he wrote for the Star about restaurants in Madrid where one could buy suckling roast pig, a good pension where bullfighters lived and where the El Grecos were hung in the Pardo. He admitted his one big reason for going to Spain—to see the bullfights. The young journalist had little money but nevertheless his happiest moments were sitting in a sidewalk café at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and, as he later recorded, “with tickets in my pocket for a bullfight.” His first day in Spain, he claimed, was the most exciting in his life.
His first major bullfight was in Seville. From there he went to Granada visiting gypsy caves and drinking brandy. And then, on to Ronda, a spectacular village with an ancient bull ring in the mountains above Malaga.
The next time Hemingway returned to Spain, a year later, he brought his young wife Hadley. Following the recommendations of Gertrude Stein he visited Pamplona, an inland city on a golden plateau in the Basque country. Early in July each year there was a celebration, the Festival of San Fermin. It lasted for a week and attracted the best matadors and the bravest bulls in Spain.
Earnest and Hadley arrived a week before the fights and settled in a cheap pension. The festival began with fireworks and continued throughout a noisy week of drinking and dancing, with religious processions and special masses in the churches. And, of course, bullfights, or corridas, every afternoon.
Each morning at dawn Ernest aroused Hadley to watch the bulls come galloping down the mile-and-a-half of cobblestone street to the pens at the Plaza de Toros. At the head of he bulls ran all the young men of Pamplona, wearing white shirts and red neckerchiefs, flirting with death while showing off to the crowds that were packed six-deep along the route. Five of the best matadors in Spain were gored in the first five days.
After reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, his fist novel, based on his experiences in Pamplona, I naturally wanted to go there. I timed my arrival for the July feria, expecting the festival to be only a mere shadow of that depicted in Hemingway’s novel. Fiction at its best, it was more than a novel. Pamplona was real, just as Hemingway described it, not only to the running of the bulls, but to the names of the hotels and cafes, the drinks, the food, and even the reaction of the people. I swear I could see Hemingway’s characters in the faces of the people having the same fun and good times as he had. And when I looked hard, and saw the young men running down the street ahead of the bulls, I had to leap over the barrier and do the same.
I have been back since, several times, and I don’t think the tourists are disappointed. It seems they carry copies of The Sun Also Rises.
After the ferias in Pamplona, Hemingway and his friends would take the bus for Burguette, a Basque village in the Pyrenees near the ancient site if Roncevaux and go fishing in the Irati River a few kilometres way. On one occasion they hiked to Andorra along the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, a 460-kilometre trek taking two weeks. I did the same route, but I cheated. I drove it in a Jeep.
Hemingway loved the Pyrenees; he loved the ice cold mountain streams, the great beech forests which, he said, had never known an axe, and the tall swaying pine groves.
In Pamplona, Hemingway befriended Juanito Quintana whom he wrote about in his book Death in the Afternoon. Juanito owned the bull ring and Hotel Quintana but lost them during the Civil War. On Hemmingway’s last trip to Spain in 1960, he travelled with Juanito around the country by motorcar.
After his first visit to Pamplona, Hemingway began following a young bull fighter around Spain. He was Ordonez. At the same time, he was writing the plot of The Sun Also Rises. Ordonez appeared in the book.
In his earlier years when in Madrid, Hemingway stayed at the Pension Aguilar in Calle San Jeronimo, at ten pesetas a night. When he was more affluent, he stayed at the Palace Hotel. He often went to the Cerveccria Alemana on the Plaza Santa Ana to dine, a favourite hangout for matadors and bullfight impresarios. These places are still there, as is the Plaza de Toros, the largest bullring in the world. The only difference is that today taxis stop in front and not horse-drawn carriages.
The Spain that Hemingway loved was about to erupt in 1936 as the country came closer to revolution. Hemingway considered himself a friend of Spain* and,* when the Spanish Civil War did break out, he covered the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance as an anti-war correspondent. He set up office in the Gran Via Hotel in Madrid (it’s still there) and covered the fighting from battlefront to all corners of Spain. His dispatches were in-between-the-lines reporting. Madrid was bombarded and the Gran Via was so strewn with broken glass it looked like a battle front. At one front along the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains he spent days on horseback visiting the Loyalist positions.
From this experience came his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. North of Madrid is the Escorial mountaintop where the characters in his book, Pablo’s band, had hid out. Hemingway often went there on picnics in later years whenever he returned to Spain*. It’s an easy trip to make by car today. The cold mountain stream is still there where Pilar washed her feet, the cave where Pablo’s band lived, and the bridge, since rebuilt, that was the target in the book.
Hemingway’s last big fling in Spain was in 1959 when he was commissioned by Life magazine to do a series of articles on bullfighting. The summer of 1959 was, by his own admission, one of the best times of his life. That summer he toured the bullfight circuit with Spain’s top matadors. Among the Zaragoza mob, as he called them, were the movie actress Ava Gardner and the two reigning matadors in Spain at the time, Luis Dominguin and Antonio Ordonez, son of Cayetano Ordonez. Cayetano was the top matador when Hemingway first went to Spain in 1923 and it was he who was the prototype for Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises.
When Hemingway wasn’t at the ferias or the corridas, he was visiting museums. He loved the Prado in Madrid. Great art had always been a force in his life. He said he learned everything he knew about landscapes from studying the masters—Cezanne, Monet, Gauguin. The Prado contained paintings he admired above all others. The girl whom he had loved longer than any other woman in is life was there at the Prado. She was the girl in Andrea del Sarto’s painting "Portrait of a Woman.” She’s still there. See her when you visit the Prado.
Next to the Prado it was cathedrals. He knew and visited every cathedral in Spain. He considered the one in Burgos in the north as the finest in Spain. *On Hemingway’s final visit to Madrid, he and his fourth wife Mary stayed at Hotel Felipe II, another hotel he loved. And for good reason. Goya was the architect, and Velasquez the landscaper. The food here was ordinary so he would make the half hour drive to Madrid to dine at the El Callejon, which he claimed, “Was low on atmosphere but high on cuisine.” You might want to check it out.
Hemingway’s Spain is easy to find. You need either a good pair of hiking shoes or a bicycle, a taste for wine drunk from a bota and the love of a good time. Then and only then will you find Hemingway’s Spain. Of course, Thai will take you there.
Next week I will take readers dancing in the streets of Paris, and in Papeete, Tahiti, as well, during their July festivals.
Spare prohibits me from writing Questions & Answers this week. Sometimes I get so exciting telling readers about places to travel, I can’t stop talking, or writing. In another article, later, I will tell readers about meeting Hemingway at a corrida in Madrid.
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)
Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited. | 
