Pamplona

Where it sits. Pamplona stands on a bluff above a bend of the river Arga in the middle of the Navarrese basin, roughly halfway between the western Pyrenees and the Ebro valley, at about 450 metres. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Navarre and a city of some two hundred thousand people, with a compact walled old town on the high ground and modern districts spreading south and west. The position is a crossroads: the pass of Roncesvalles, the historic gateway from France across the western Pyrenees, lies fifty kilometres north-east, which is why Pamplona is the first substantial city that walkers on the Camino Francés reach after crossing into Spain, and why armies have fought over the site since antiquity.

Roman camp to fortified capital. The Roman general Pompey wintered an army here in 75 and 74 BC, and the settlement that grew from the camp took his name as Pompaelo. Through the Middle Ages the site was not one town but three mutually hostile burghs, the Navarrería and the Frankish quarters of San Cernin and San Nicolás, each walled against the others until Charles III of Navarre forced them together with the Privilege of the Union in 1423. The cathedral of Santa María la Real, rebuilt in Gothic form from the late fourteenth century, holds the alabaster tomb of Charles III and his queen and a cloister that is among the finest Gothic cloisters anywhere in Europe; its façade is a cool neoclassical front added by Ventura Rodríguez in the 1780s and quite at odds with what stands behind it. After Castile annexed Navarre in 1512, Philip II ordered a vast pentagonal citadel begun in 1571 on the Antwerp model; it survives as parkland, and long stretches of the seventeenth-century bastions still ring the old town.

San Fermín. For nine days from 6 July the city gives itself over to the festival of its patron saint. It opens at noon on the sixth with the chupinazo, a rocket fired from the town hall balcony into a packed Plaza Consistorial, and closes at midnight on the fourteenth with the candlelit lament Pobre de mí. The event that made it famous is the encierro, run at eight each morning: six fighting bulls and a group of steers are released from the corral at Santo Domingo and driven 875 metres up the hill, along Mercaderes, round the notorious right-hand bend into the Estafeta and down into the bullring, a route that takes the animals between two and three minutes and the runners rather longer to recover from. Ernest Hemingway came in 1923 and used the festival as the setting for the second half of The Sun Also Rises in 1926; his bust stands outside the Plaza de Toros, and the Café Iruña on the Plaza del Castillo, open since 1888, keeps a corner devoted to him.

On screen. Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) built its climax here. The last of the three challenges the friends set each other is the bull run, and the production filmed in Pamplona around the San Fermín encierro, staging its principals in the streets of the route and the bullring at the end of it. Coming after the film's diving sequence on the Costa Brava and the tomato fight at Buñol, the Pamplona finale completed a Spanish itinerary that Indian travel agencies promptly turned into a packaged tour, and the July festival has drawn a visible South Asian contingent ever since.

The city in the other fifty-one weeks. Pamplona out of season is a prosperous, green, notably liveable northern Spanish city, and much easier to enjoy. The Plaza del Castillo is its drawing room, arcaded on three sides with cafés under the arches. The Estafeta, terrifying in July, is an ordinary shopping street the rest of the year. The old walls make a continuous walk of several kilometres with views down to the Arga and out to the Pyrenean foothills, and the Ciudadela park hosts open-air sculpture and concerts. Navarrese cooking is a serious draw in its own right: piquillo peppers from Lodosa, white asparagus, lamb, Roncal cheese, and a pintxo culture in the Calle San Nicolás that rivals the better-known bars of San Sebastián at lower prices.

Getting there and timing. Trains from Madrid take about three hours, and Zaragoza and San Sebastián are each roughly two hours away by road; Pamplona has a small airport with domestic links. During San Fermín, accommodation prices multiply several times over and rooms are taken months ahead, so many visitors sleep in Estella or Tudela and travel in. May, June and September give warm days, long evenings and a city that belongs to its residents again.