PAMPLONA, Spain (AP) — After five gorings on the first two days of this year’s San Fermin festival, officials in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona said Sunday’s third running of the bulls was quick and resulted in only minor injuries.
The regional government of Navarra said that four men, three Spaniards and one Frenchman, needed to be treated at a nearby hospital for minor injuries caused by knocks and falls.
“It was a tranquil bull run,” hospital spokesman Tomas Belzunegui said.
Over the first two days of the festival, four Americans and a Spaniard were gored during the daily bull runs. None were life-threatening injuries.
The bulls from the Puerto de San Lorenzo ranch, which debuted at the festival, completed the 930-yard (850-meter) cobbled-street course in 2 minutes, 22 seconds. That is well under the average of three minutes for the run that weaves through the city center.
A brown bull named “Huracan,” or Hurricane, broke away early and sped ahead through the parting crowds of runners, several of whom barely dodged its swinging horns.
Huracan came close to catching a runner when it hooked a horn in the pant leg of a young man entering the bullring, lifting him along the wall before dragging him for a few meters (yards). The man apparently escaped unscathed.
The nine-day San Fermin fiesta attracts tens of thousands of partygoers from Spain and abroad. It was popularized by Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
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