HISTORY OF THE TXUPINAZO
From the guide Sanfermines, 204 hours of fiesta

The "Txupinazo" or rocket does not have a very long history compared to the rest of Sanfermines. From 1591, the year in which the fiestas of Sanfermin were transferred to the month of July, until 1901, the starting point of the festivities was the walk taken by the municipal authorities, accompanied by macebearers, giants, musicians, dancers and public, to the parish church of San Lorenzo to participate in the "Vísperas" ceremony for the saint.

In the present century, the custom was adopted of shooting up several rockets at noon on July 6 from the Plaza del Castillo. This simple event, little by little, gained the approval of the people of Pamplona. Sometime in the 1930s, a neighbor asked if he could light the first rocket's fuse. In 1939 Joaquin Ilundain, of Pamplona, lighted the fuse announcing Sanfermines and repeated the feat the next year as first lieutenant-mayor. In 1941 Ilundain suggested to the Town Hall, presided then by Jose Garran Mosso, that the first rocket be shot up from a balcony of this institution, beginning in this way a custom that soon would, along with the running of the bulls, be universally representative of the fiesta of Sanfermin.

This ceremony was not even suspended in 1952 when construction work on the actual Town Hall meant that the rocket had to be fired from the balcony of a temporary Town Hall, located in the Art and Music Schools in the Plaza de ]a República Argentina - today known as the Plaza del Vínculo.

Lighting the fuse, which is a matter of pride for anyone from Pamplona, has always fallen to persons linked in some way to the town government, with the exception of Manuel Fraga Iribarne, then minister of Informacion y Turismo (1964).

The mayor designates the lucky one in charge of firing the "Txupinazo". In 1979, with the first democratically elected corporation, the mayor, Julian Balduz Calvo, decided that this priviledge would go, each year, to a different political group making up the town government, beginning with the group having the largest number of representatives and continuing on down. This cycle is renewed every four years, coinciding with elections. In 1991 Mayor Alfredo Jaime Irujo shared the fuse-lighting with Jose Maria Perez Salazar, who, together with Joaquin Ilundain (no longer alive), had suggested that the rocket should be fired from the Plaza Consistorial 50 years before.

It seems taht is not very clear who was the first taht lighted the rocket. our friend Javier Alonso, along with some of his friends, told us that he remembers a very well known republican from Pamplona called Etxepare; who was the first person who set off the txupinazo from the beginning of the Republica in 1931 to 1936. He was there and he still remembers the way he was dressed "In taht old days fashion; with a bow tie and a straw hat". There were not many people in Plaza del Castillo.
After Etxepare, as it is said in the book of our friends Larrion and Pimoulier, Joaquín Ilundáin an Pérez Salazar were the following people who lighted the rocket.

© Larrión y Pimoulier Editores