Seconds before the chupinazo rocket was to arc over Pamplona’s packed town hall square, a banner unfurled among the sea of white and red. “Destroy Israel,” it read, beneath a crossed-out Israeli flag. The initials Ehks, linked to a radical Basque socialist movement, were stitched at the bottom. The image, captured on a thousand smartphones, ricocheted across social media even as the traditional cry of “¡Viva San Fermín!” swallowed the square. Israeli diplomats in Madrid swiftly condemned what they called a “wave of antisemitism in Spain,” citing the banner alongside the heckling of a Jewish writer at a Santander book fair and the harassment of French Jews in Barcelona. The European Jewish Congress said such rhetoric “normalises hostility,” while Spain’s own Federation of Jewish Communities called it an incitement to violence, not political critique.

By eight the next morning, the festival’s more familiar ritual had begun. Six fighting bulls, each weighing between 570 and 610 kilograms, thundered through the cobbled alleyways of the old city, their hooves skidding on the uneven stone. Runners, a mix of locals and foreigners, sprinted ahead or pressed themselves against doorways. Five were treated for contusions; three—an American and two Spaniards—were taken to hospital. The herd covered the 850-metre course in two minutes and sixteen seconds, twenty seconds faster than the previous year, leaping over those who slipped and fell. No gorings were reported, but the morning’s adrenaline was, as ever, shadowed by the knowledge that the same animals would be killed in the evening’s bullfights.

A century ago, a young Ernest Hemingway stood on a hotel balcony and watched this same “human river” of runners. His novel Fiesta, published in 1926, transformed a local religious feast into an international obsession. Today, Americans are the second-largest foreign contingent after the French, who account for 27 per cent of overseas visitors. A study by Bankinter estimates the nine-day festival generates €259.4 million, with 1.6 million people attending organised events and 600 journalists accredited from 13 countries. The red kerchief knotted at every neck is not mere costume: it evokes the blood of San Fermín, the third-century bishop and martyr who, according to tradition, was beheaded in his cell for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods. A prayer circulated in Spanish-language media asks the saint for protection “from all physical and spiritual danger.”

Yet the festival’s globalisation has layered new tensions onto old ones. Animal-rights groups have long condemned the encierros and the corridas that follow, and each year’s injuries renew the debate over human safety. The banner incident, viewed from Tel Aviv and European Jewish communities, was not an isolated outburst but part of a pattern. The Israeli chargé d’affaires in Madrid listed three separate episodes in a single week, demanding Spanish authorities act. For a festival that thrives on its image of joyous chaos, the intrusion of such raw geopolitical anger was a reminder that even the most entrenched traditions now unfold on a stage where every gesture is instantly global.

By mid-morning, the streets were again thick with musicians, tourists, and the smell of fried dough. The bulls that had charged so fiercely were resting in the corrals of the Plaza de Toros, awaiting their final hour. In the crowd, a runner from Ohio adjusted his red scarf and checked his phone for the video of his own close call. The banner had vanished, but the image of those massive animals leaping over fallen bodies—and the knowledge that the festival’s sacred and profane energies would be replayed each dawn for another week—lingered like the echo of hooves on stone.