La Tomatina is a Fiesta held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol near to Valencia in Spain. Thousands upon thousands of people make their way from all corners of the world to participate in this, the ‘World’s Biggest Food Fight’ where more than one hundred tons of over-ripe tomatoes are thrown in the streets.
The following is an edited and slightly amended version of a description of this year's Fiesta taken from the newspaper El Mundo:
The red of 150,000 kilos of tomatoes has coloured the central streets of the Valencian town of Buñol as every last Wednesday in August for 78 years. La Tomatina has once again been festive, international and massive.The party, whose images go around the world on television and social networks, began at noon, with the slow parade of six trucks loaded with 150 tons of tomatoes -30 more than the figure provided yesterday by the cooperative that supplies them- ripe and juicy, not suitable for consumption but ideal as ammunition in this pitched "battle", in which everyone fights everyone with a clean tomato.The President of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, followed this celebration from the balcony of the City Hall with some 20,000 participants and in which a helicopter and more than 200 Civil Guard agents, in addition to other security forces, have been deployed to monitor and attend to any incident arising from the crowding. Mazón has assured that next year he will go in a swimsuit and will live it from the street.This year many citizens of India have been seen mobilized by a Bollywood movie, although there were also those from the United States, Australia or Japan, among other nationalities.For an hour, the tomatoes have "flown" in this "war" that started almost by chance in 1945; in fact nobody really knows how it started, you can take your pick from the many tales as recounted in the Official Website pages below.
They have already started selling tickets for next year's Tomatina which will be on the 28th of August 2024 and you can even book your place for the following year when it will be held on the 27th of August 2025. Details are on the official website here -
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