The Giants

Almost as symbolic as the bull runs -although for many, above all outsiders, they continue to be the great unknown of the festival- are the Giants of Pamplona. Having already been in existence for nearly a century and a half, the current giants are the successors of others which magnified the most marked pageantry of the city for hundreds of years.

The Giants -the procession of Giants and Big-heads, Kilikis and Zaldikos- mark the experience of the Sanfermines of the people of Pamplona from their childhood. Without them, the Sanfermines would lose an essential part of their character.

Some people may think that they are merely an entertainment for children, but those who think that will never understand the soul of the fiesta and the people who live ¡t. The child as he becomes an adolescent and then a young person, may forget the Procession. But when a few years on, he becomes more mature he returns, maybe motivated by nostalgia for his childhood. Giants and Big-heads, Kilikis and Zaldikos, are in their own right a fundamental part of the fiesta in its deepest significance.

And when the calendar signals the inevitable end of the Sanfermines of a particular year, the saddest farewell is not the one which begins with the dismantling of the barriers of the bull run and ends with the candles -the burles- que and surrealist pantonúme of the pobre de mí-, but rather the farewell to the giants at lunchtime on the 14th from the platforms of the bus station.