Spanish bull fiesta launched

REVELLERS filled Pamplona with the acidic smell of the local sparkling wine yesterday as a series of powerful firecrackers launched Spain's best known festival, the running of the bulls. Hundreds of thousands of locals and foreign visitors packed the central square of this northern Spanish city where they sprayed each other with cheap sparkling wine and shaving foam and smeared each other in flour and mustard. Yesterday's party kicks off the San Fermin festival, made famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1920s novel The Sun also Rises.
Each morning over a week in July, six bulls are set loose on a 2'700-foot course through Pamplona's cobbled streets where thrill seekers run with the half-tonne animals to the bull ring.