Witness / Attend in July

The Fiesta de San Fermin runs July 6-14, and the eight morning encierros (bull runs) are why most people come. The route is 875 meters through the old town from the corral at Santo Domingo to the bullring; the bulls cover it in under three minutes. The majority of the crowd watches from barricades and balconies rather than running. Either way, the spectacle of six fighting bulls and eight steers moving at full speed through a narrow medieval street, with thousands of white-and-red clad runners around them, has no equivalent anywhere in the world. The rest of the fiesta -- the street parties, the fireworks, the bullfights -- runs around the clock for nine days.

The Palio di Siena is not a performance put on for tourists. It is a horse race that the citizens of Siena run for themselves, with a ferocity of local rivalry between the seventeen contrade (city districts) that has not diminished in 400 years. The race itself lasts 90 seconds around the Piazza del Campo, a three-lap bareback sprint on a dirt track laid over the medieval brick square. Jockeys can be bribed, horses can be bought, and alliances between contrade shift in the days before the race in a political maneuvering that is as much the point as the race itself. To watch it is to watch a city reveal something about itself that tourism usually obscures. The Piazza holds 30,000 standing spectators for free; the best windows and balconies surrounding it are rented to visitors.