When technology is capable of circulating thousands of videos and images per second, it is even more fascinating to contemplate this black and white snapshot that was captured in Pamplona a day like today 100 years ago, who has been able to resist with dignity the passage of decades and misfortunes.
The photograph was collected in the local press at the time in memory of an experience dangerous and original of these festivities, but what no one could imagine was that it would become the first image of the Sanfermines that transcended the borders of this city, the first to go “viral” only a century in advance.
The snapshot is assigned to Juanito Miquelez. He was captured during the confinement of the July 10, 1922 and a fallen runner appears at the end of the street merchants. It is observed that the see The pack leader fixed his attention on the groom. Fortunately for him, the morlaco did not attack him or suffer damage from the rest of the herd, which passed away from the Plaza de Toros, which that year changed to its current location.
“The running of the bulls in those years was at 6 a.m. and there were very few runners”
The boy in question was called Jose Maria Garcia-Mina and his son, of the same name, keeps this framed image and keeps in his memory some anecdotes of those bullfights at the beginning of the last century, when only a few brave people ran through the streets of Pamplona in front of the bulls, most of them belonging to the guild butchers.
The son of this runner has 93 years old and enviable health. He goes to the Plaza del Castillo with his grandson, Daniel Ramírez García-Mina, a Madrid-based writer and journalist, who has investigated everything related to this image of his helpless great-grandfather in front of the herd at full speed .
“The running of the bulls took place at six o’clock in the morning. There were hardly any runners and a few spectators on the balconies along the course. It was the background of the running of the bulls that we have today, only now they are very crowded, ”commented the writer.
“A Bad Day”
José María García-Mina remembers his father the great fondness he had for bullfighting and that that morning in front of the Miuras he was not in his best shape. “Apparently he had spent 15 or 20 days with gastritis, milk-based. He blamed that on being weak.”
To commemorate the centenary of this image, grandfather and grandson accepted the invitation of this newspaper to go to the exact place where it was taken. That day, it was hot and there was a lot of noise. Pamplona has changed, but Calle Mercaderes remains almost the same, except for the businesses that existed then that have given way to other commercial enterprises.
“It is clear that the visit to Pamplona marked Heminway; three years later, he publishes Fiesta »
“He was 31 years old and he told me that he had heard the bull snort from very close, that he had almost touched it. Although in the image it seems that the danger comes from the first bull, he told me that the second passed even closer. It’s hard to tell if he just fell or got back up.”
José María García-Mina keeps a large format reproduction of the photograph at home and assures with a certain pride that since its publication it has acquired a certain public notoriety. Years later, a famous bakery of the time, located in the current Chapitela, made a marzipan cake recreating the image of the runner who fell in front of the herd.
Your photo, in a bar in Germany
The protagonist’s real surprise came years later, during a trip to Germany to buy machinery for the Compañía Navarra de Abonos Químicos, of which he was the director.
“During a trip to Germany to buy machines, he saw himself in the photo in a bar”
In a bar, possibly in the city of Düsseldorf, he found the reproduction of the photograph with him as the protagonist. “There, in a bar where the photos were displayed under glass, we saw it. Imagine how it stayed, “recalls his son
However, it was not the first time that this image crossed borders and became international. The photo appeared in an article signed by a young journalist from a Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, who arrived in Pamplona in 1923 in search of good material for his reporting.
It was about Ernest Hemingway, that he had set up as a correspondent in Paris a year earlier and that we do not know how and why he appeared in Pamplona. In the report he wrote in October 1923 for Canadian Sanfermines readers, he decided to include the image of the young man who fell in Mercaderes Street with a photo of the Plaza de Toros full of people and some vignettes on the running of the bulls.
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