The rocket that heralds the beginning of the Sanfermines – Pamplona’s bull-running fiesta – will not be fired for another two hours but already the Plaza Consistorial is three quarters full of families in red and white, tourists in pirate tricorns and teenagers mixing their 10am aperitivos of cola and rough red wine.

Locals are clumped outside bars while police holding submachine guns and riot helmets keep an eye on the hordes necking sangria close to a patch of purple graffiti that reads: “We’re going to burn the heteropatriarchy.”

Two years after an 18-year-old woman was sexually assaulted by five men – and a decade after a young nurse, Nagore Laffage, was beaten to death by a man with whom she had refused to have sex – the city’s fiesta has become one of the frontlines in the battle for social and legal change in Spain.

Though deeply proud of their idiosyncratic, boisterous and often dangerous festival, the people of Pamplona know that what the mayor once termed “the black stain” of sexual assault has left an enduring mark on the city. In the #MeToo era, in a country where five million workers took part in March’s nationwide “feminist strike”, things on the streets of Pamplona’s old town are changing.

“For many years now, the Sanfermines have been sold as a lawless festival, where there are no rules and you can do whatever you want without any consequences,” says Zuriñe Altable, spokeswoman for Pamplona’s Gora Iruñea collective.

Clara Martín, a 28-year-old law student from Salamanca, and Sofía Sánchez, 33, in Pamplona’s Plaza Consistorial Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian

“I think that we’ve seen efforts to change that image in recent years but there’s still a lot to do. The image of Pamplona and the Sanfermines over the past few years has been exemplary – an entire city standing up to assaults and prepared to take them on.”

The city council has been working hard to raise awareness of sexual violence and to encourage victims to come forward. It has also drawn on its considerable human resources.

Xavier Ibañez, the council’s director of citizen safety, says that some 3,500 guardia civil, national police and local police officers will be patrolling the eight-day festival and will be able to “hermetically seal” the central area during the busiest moments, such as the bull-runs and fireworks displays.

“We’ve got a series of measures and barriers that mean people won’t be able to get through,” he says.

“We’ve also come up with a very simple app. If someone’s suffered an assault, they press a button on their phone, their location comes up on the screen at police headquarters, and a patrol is dispatched.”

A second button on the app allows anyone to report an assault, whether as victim or witness, while a third lets the user choose someone from their address book to track their journey home on a map to ensure they arrive safely.



The message, says Ibañez, is clear: “Come here and enjoy it. This is a safe city - probably one of the safest cities in all of Spain - so join in and respect everyone else.”

Altable is equally concise on what the Sanfermines should, and shouldn’t, be about.

“Women should be able to have fun, to laugh, to drink, to dance and to walk wherever we want – whether alone or with others – so that we can exercise our right to enjoy the festival however we want and without fear of being attacked because of it.”



Like most visitors, Clara Martín, a 28-year-old law student from Salamanca attending the festival with her friend Sofía Sánchez, seems unfazed. While very aware of the 2016 attack carried out by the five men known as the Wolfpack after their WhatsApp group, she had been determined to come.



“It’s one of the most important festivals in Spain and they say you have to experience it at least once in life,” she says. “I think the Wolfpack was an awful thing but it doesn’t have to stain the Sanfermines every year.”

For others, however, the association is as ineluctable as it is agonising.

Nagore Laffage’s mother, Asun Casasola, is heartened by the social change she is beginning to see across Spain and by the furious protests that followed a court’s decision in April to clear the Wolfpack of rape.

But she still cannot understand why her daughter’s killer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, nor why the Wolfpack were found guilty only of sexual abuse. The law, says Casasola, is lagging behind the society it is meant to protect.



“It was very clearly a murder. He broke her skull and he hit her 36 times. She made a phone call [to the emergency services] saying, ‘he’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me.’ And yet the jury said it was manslaughter.”

“And look at the Wolfpack – they said it was sexual abuse and not rape. But rape is rape. And murder is murder. Full stop. People’s attitudes are changing and they’re going out on to the streets and protesting. The problem is that the laws haven’t changed.”

Until people “sit down, get on with it” and change the laws, victims like Nagore – and their families – will carry on being failed by the courts.

“It was different at the beginning when I had my anger and the hope that justice would be done,” says Casasola.

“Now I just have my loneliness and her absence every day. The worst days are her birthday, which is 1 March, the feast of San Fermín and Christmas. Those are the days I miss her most. They’re the hardest.”