Showers of wine have been poured in Pamplona, Northern Spain, as thousands of people in red scarfs came to city plaza to celebrate the opening of the San Fermin festival. This celebration is famous for its fireworks shows, parties, parades and the running of the bulls, when hundreds of people run in front of six bulls down the narrow streets.
The festival of San Fermín in the city of Pamplona (Navarre, Spain), is a deeply rooted celebration held annually, when the opening of the fiesta is marked by setting off the pyrotechnic chupinazo. While its most famous event is the encierro, or the running of the bulls, the week long celebration involves many other traditional and folkloric events. It is known locally as Sanfermines and is held in honor of Saint Fermin, the co-patron of Navarre. It has become probably the most internationally renowned fiesta in Spain. Over 1,000,000 people come to watch this festival.
A very fast fifth running of the bulls of Sanfermin 2012 and also a very clean run. The bulls from the Fuente Ymbro bull ranch in Cadiz ran together over a large part of the course. While there were a lot of trip-ups and falls along the different stretches of the course, from both the runners and the bulls, it seems that none of the runners received any gorings from the bulls. The pack come out of the pens close together and ran up the slope of Santo Domingo in a tight group. At the end of this stretch, a black bull raced ahead of the others and lead the pack at a very fast pace. It was soon accompanied by the heaviest of the bulls, an off-white colored bull, that joined it as they crossed Mercaderes. Both bulls crashed into the fencing on the corner of this stretch and slipped to the ground. This gave their companions coming up behind the chance to catch up with them again and all the bulls entered Estafeta Street together. .
Here the distance between the bulls began to gradually widen somewhat and the runners were able to show off their skills, getting in close in front of the horns of the bulls. The bulls all reached the bullring at a fast pace. The rear bull, “Infundio”, came in alone to the bullring totally spent out and it fell several times in the arena which meant that it took some time to get it to enter the safety of the pens and in the end, the whole running was completed in a time of 3min. 12sec.