Having started out as a powerful fortress town defending the northern approaches to Spain at the foothills of the Pyrenees, Pamplona later became capital of Navarra – often a semi-autonomous state – and an important stop on the Camino de Santiago. With plenty to offer around its Casco Antiguo – enticing churches, a beautiful park and the massive citadel – Pamplona makes an appealing year-round destination. The week of the Fiestas de San Fermín is a definite annual highlight, and a must-see if you can.

Everything you’re likely to want to see in Pamplona lies within its remarkably compact Casco Antiguo. The Plaza del Castillo, ringed with fashionable cafés, is a glorious and very much lived-in jumble of buildings from all eras, where every twisting stone lane is worth exploring and intriguingly tatty old shops and bars lie concealed behind medieval shutters.

Travel

Pamplona is linked by motorways with neighbouring Zaragoza, San Sebastián, Vitoria and Logroño with buses providing public transportation. The airport schedules several flights daily to Madrid and Barcelona. There are also railway links with Madrid, Zaragoza and northern Spain, operated by Renfe.

The Romans called the city Pompaelo, after its founder Pompey the Great. They were succeeded by the Visigoths and then, briefly, by the Muslims. Navarra has been a melting pot of dynastic, political and cultural aspirations and tensions, ever since Charlemagne rampaged across the Pyrenees from France in 778. The city achieved great things under Sancho III in the 11th century and its position on the Camino de Santiago ensured its prosperity. Twentieth-century prosperity saw an expansion of the city.

The urban growth has been accompanied by the development of industry and services. Population growth has been the effect of an intense immigration process during the 1960s and 1970s: from the Navarrese countryside and from other less developed regions of Spain, mainly Castile and León and Andalusia. Since the 1990s the immigration is coming mainly from abroad.