I posted a somewhat flippant reply to a Facebook buddy that Pamplona was a shrine to Hemingway and Milton Keynes. This is not entirely fanciful, but before I get on to the city's post-modern charms, a few observations about its more traditional attributes. We visited here surreptitiously back in 1992, hopping over the mountains from France on an illegal day trip as our car insurance did not cover us for Spain. We remembered a somewhat scruffy park, some old streets, and I was convinced we had visited the bullring with the statue of Hemingway beside it.
The motorhome Aire is in the modern suburb of Berriozar about 3km out of the city. A bike track goes straight to the centre but we opted to take the bus. They are regular (no. 17) every half hour or so, and the fare is only €1.30. Perfecto!
As we neared the city centre the place looked completely different to how I remembered it. It was bustling and full of modern office blocks, not the dusty backwater in my mind's eye. The bus deposited us next to a big Corte Inglesias store. We had no real plan of where to go, so we set off to find the park on the somewhat fatuous basis that we remembered that it had a nice pavilion selling coffee. Gill recalled an interesting antique coffee maker.
We walked through some narrow old streets, found the park, we even found the coffee pavilion of yore. Someone in the last quarter century had taken the liberty to replace quaint coffee machine.
We were suitably outraged, nevertheless, stopped for a coffee. It was served by a man with such spectacular bad cold he should have been in isolation. In the process we did learn the Spanish word for catarrh, which will come in handy if the chap proves to have been an active biological hazard .
Where next? The bullring! This was across the other side of the city and a bit tricky to find. We navigated ourselves through a series shaded squares, each contained a monument to obscure figures from Navarre's past when it was an independent kingdom.
Finally we found the Plaza del Toro which is the end point of the famous annual Pamplona bull run. Neither it nor the bust of Hemingway in front of the stadium looked anything like how I remembered the place.Now I doubt myself, wondering if we simply intended to come here but the walk proved too much for our small kids What I actually recall may be a photograph from a guidebook, but somehow actuality and wishful thinking got scrambled and my vivid, but erroneous memory is the result. Maybe the claim to having a 'good memory' is nothing more than the capacity to reconstitute snippets of your past so vividly that you are convinced of their verisimilitude. The point is, I guess, how can we be wholly certain of anything we remember because it is always fragmentary. It can never be complete, since it's impossible to recall the things we have forgotten, or failed to notice in the first place.
We sat beneath the bulk of the bull ring glad of its shadow. The afternoon was hot and we had been walking for almost an hour. Our youngest called. She was born two years after the time we were here first. It was good to hear from her. All seemed well. The nub of the call was, no she had not yet contacted the student loan company (the important issue from our p.o.v.); she had, however recently taken up Kyūdō - Japanese archery (the important issue from her standpoint). We decided to head back to the bus stop. On the way we came across a huge sculpture depicting the bull run. The work was recent but looked older because of its dramatic, realistic style - a sort of Rodin-lite.
In front of the statue - more entertainment. Two small rectangular areas had been fenced-off. In one a DJ was playing a mixture of trance and jazzy hip-hop. In the other a couple of girls started dancing like laconic robots. I thought they were being very cool; Gill, however, wondered if they were 'just practicing'. I took some video on my phone, you can judge for yourself.
As we arrived back at the bus stop a number 17 pulled in. We jumped on board without even glancing where it was heading. The number 17 crosses Pamplona west to east. The moho aire is next to the final stop at the west end; we had hopped on the bus heading eastwards. This was not apparent for some minutes until Gill, concerned that the buildings we were passing looked entirely unfamiliar, checked the GPS on her phone. A panicky exchange ensued, do we stay on board on the assumption the bus will head back east eventually, or alight at the next stop and catch a 17 heading in the opposite direction. We took the latter option, finding ourselves marooned in a development area of massive mid-rise housing blocks.
Now we discovered we only had a €50 note, so as well as a bus stop, we now needed change too. We had passed a petrol station a few hundred yards down the road. So we headed back there, bought a bottle of Rueda from the chiller, checked on Google maps that the bus stop opposite was the one for the number 17 heading west. It was, and Google magic even told us that the next bus was due in 20 minutes.
It was a hot and sweaty wait. The newly constructed bus shelters are stylish, but built of glass, which is an odd choice for a climate where 35° summer temperatures are commonplace. Rather than wilt like a hothouse plant, I took to wandering about photographing the new developments, all the while entertaining Gill with various cockeyed theories as to why the area resembled Milton Keynes re-designed by IKEA. The 17 duly arrived. We recognised the driver as we boarded, it was the same bus as we had leapt off 30 miutes earlier, now on its return leg.
Why is Pamplona expanding? What lies behind the building boom? The answer had to wait until the next day. As we circled the city on the southern ring road we passed an extensive Volkswagen factory. One of the big differences between the UK and places like Italy and Spain is the size of their manufacturing sector. More factories and fewer distribution centres. If the plan for the future is to rebalance the UK economy towards production, do people realise that in relation to many of our European neighbours we are going to have to play catch-up?
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