Pamplona opens this Monday, July 6, the Sanfermines 2026 with a Chupinazo of marked health recognition. The fuse of the rocket announcing the festivities will be lit by Clint Jean Louis Fernández and Araceli Sergio Aguilera, representing the Subdirectorate of Emergencies of Navarra, the candidacy chosen by the citizens of Pamplona to inaugurate the festivities from the City Hall balcony.
The event will take place, as tradition dictates, at 12:00 PM from the Pamplona City Hall. Fernández and Sergio will be in charge of uttering the festive formula —“Iruindarrak, pamplonesas, pamploneses, ¡Viva San Fermín! Gora San Fermín!”— before officially starting nine days and 204 hours of festivities.
A tribute to the health device for the bull runs
The choice of the Subdirectorate of Emergencies of Navarra has an evident symbolic weight: to recognize the role of the health teams that work throughout the year and, in a particularly visible way, during the San Fermín bull runs. The candidacy was proposed by the Peña La Escalerica de San Fermín with the aim of making visible the deployment of emergencies and urgent care that is activated during the festivities.
According to the Pamplona City Council, this device includes five mobile ICUs, the health coordination of the 112, and care in out-of-hospital emergency centers, with the aim of guaranteeing an immediate response to any emergency during the Sanfermines.
Jean Louis Fernández has been designated as the institutional representative of the Subdirectorate of Emergencies, which he has directed since 2023, while Araceli Sergio Aguilera, a nurse in the Tafalla mobile ICU, was chosen by internal vote among the active staff of the subdirectorate itself.
How it is chosen who launches the Chupinazo
The current selection system combines an initial screening in the General Board of the Sanfermines and a subsequent citizen vote. The entities that make up the Board present candidacies and, if there are more than five proposals, the Board selects the five that advance to the final phase. Then, a popular vote is opened among these candidacies.
In 2026, the five finalist candidacies were the Navarrese Pelota Federation, the Platform of Women against Sexist Violence, the Subdirectorate of Emergencies of Navarra, the Women researchers of the Navarrese R&D+i System, and the Coral Santiago de la Txantrea.
People over 16 years of age registered in Pamplona can vote. The City Council provides three methods: in-person voting at the Civivox network, telephone voting through 010, and online voting on the municipal website. Only one vote per person is allowed, with identification by DNI.
The winning candidacy: 3,775 votes
The Sub-directorate of Emergencies of Navarra won the popular vote with 3,775 votes, 32.15% of the 11,740 votes cast. In second place was the Platform of Women against Sexist Violence, with 2,857 votes and 24.33%, followed by the Coral Santiago de la Txantrea, with 2,629 votes and 22.39%.
The majority of votes were cast online: 10,157, 86.51% of the total. The Civivox network registered 1,236 in-person votes and 010 collected 347 votes.
Since when has it been chosen by popular vote
The popular voting system to choose the person or entity in charge of launching the Chupinazo was implemented in 2016. That year, the chosen one was Jesús Ilundáin Zaragüeta, “El Tuli”, promoter of the chant before the running of the bulls, who became the first launcher chosen by citizen vote.
Since then, the model has consolidated a participatory formula to decide who lights the fuse of the festivals. However, the City Council itself recalls that there were no Sanfermines in 2020 and 2021 due to the covid-19 pandemic and that popular voting was not applied in the following two editions either.
The participation in 2026 is the third highest since the system was implemented, behind 2025, when 20,045 votes were reached, and 2018, with 12,213.