Hemingway first attended the San Fermín festival in Pamplona in 1923. He went with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and became fascinated by the festival’s bullfights and distinctive Spanish setting.
The visit helped establish Spain as a major imaginative and personal influence on Hemingway. He returned to Pamplona in 1924 and again in June 1925, when he traveled with a group of expatriate friends and acquaintances. These experiences supplied material for his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises.
The 1925 trip was especially important to the book’s development. Soon after the fiesta ended, Hemingway began drafting the novel, completing the first version in roughly eight weeks. The book transformed his experiences among expatriates, travelers, and bullfighting enthusiasts into fiction rather than serving as a literal travel diary.
A frequent mix-up is the year 1925, because that visit was closely connected with the novel’s composition and included the larger group portrayed in the story. But his first San Fermín festival came two years earlier, in 1923. The festival itself is held each July in honor of Saint Fermín.