La Tomatina is the annual tomato throwing festival in a little town called Bunol, an hour out of…read moreValencia. A must-do for any traveller into experiencing the weird and wonderful!
Here's the history from what I learnt:
It all apparently started in 1945 at a festival when a group of young people grabbed tomatoes from a nearby stall and started a harmless food fight. Police came and stopped the troublemakers, ending the battle. A year later and each year onwards, locals returned on the same day in August, taking tomatoes for their own version of La Tomatina. In the 50s it was officially banned but villagers continued and got locked up in jail. In '59 the council allowed the event to take place after public demonstrations for it, but they introduced rules, such as how the food fight was to begin.
It all involved a greasy pole and a ham, by this I mean a full little pig, dead and hanging from the top of the pole. It was not until the locals retrieved the ham from the top that the food fight could start. By 1980 tomatoes were being provided by the city council and the international participants began to grow. Last year there were 30,000. Viva La Tomatina!
My story:
Sarah and I went nuts with the other 30,000 people, we fought our way to the top of the street where we could see the greasey pole, which meant we were in the very thick of it, and then pushed back out a bit where we had some breathing space. The crowd followed each other and so did we, chanting Ole! Ole!, clapping and singing. The locals had begun the one-sided water fight, drenching us with buckets of water and hoses from their balconies, and we just shouted for more!
Crazy Spanish guys were ripping shirts off any males that crossed their path with a shirt on, no one got past alive! I watched as Trev, Joycey and Erin came battling through the crowd, and in one fell swing Trevor had lost his shirt ripped to shreds. It is a rule that you not tear t-shirts but one that cannot be controlled in such a mad craze.
The crowd went wild when the horn went off to signify the ham had been got and the trucks of tomatoes would soon be making their slow path through the crowds to dump tomatoes at our feet. It took another fifteen minutes for the trucks to push through the crowds to grace us with its load. You can imagine all the people who had squished into this 20 foot wide street then had to squish into four foot on either side of the truck!
They came, they dumped, they rolled on out again.
And it was war.
Tomatoes were going in every which direction, and I soon lost Sarah amongst wiping the tomato acid from my eyes, pelting tomatoes at random people and staying afloat. The water and the squished tomatoes turned into a pulpy puree of salsa about six inches deep. It got so tight at times that I couldn't even reach down to get tomatoes so i just jumped up and down splashing them everywhere, grabbing handfuls off the ground and sending them anywhere.
Afterwards I was exhausted and out of it. I got one of the locals to hose me down a bit, the final ritual of the festival, and kind of felt like a footy player after a rain-struck match being pummelled about.
A hose was pulled over an old factory so I lined up to remove the majority of tomatoes from my hair that had dried and gone crusty in the heat. I wasn't without my battlescars - both shoulders have bruises, I got a tomato in the eye, I banged up my bad ankle with everyone stepping on it, and after a few days Lija and I both came out in tomato rash from all the acid.
I read somewhere that the town of Bunol sparkles after La Tomatina because the acid is a natural cleaner and they don't touch it again until the following year. How true?
