La Tomatina festival, The largest food fight in the world

The La Tomatina festival has become one of the highlights of Spain’s summer festival calendar, with people from all over the world flocking to participate in this biggest food battle, where over a hundred metric tons of tomatoes are thrown at each other and into the streets.

1- A slice of ham marks the beginning of the festival :

La Tomatina was a food fight festival take place on 30 August 2023 in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region in Spain. The tomatoes used here came from Extremadura are low-quality and less expensive.

Moreover, the town receives every year about 40,000 travellers just for have fun and throwing tomatoes at each other. Usually, the event lasts for an hour and many trucks haul the bounty of tomatoes into the center of the town Plaza Del Pueblo.

Furthermore, a slice of ham hung from the top of a large pole in the town’s already crowded square called Palo jabón. The aim is to climb up and grab this slice of ham, with the crowd chanting and singing along, while being sprayed with water hoses. Once the slice has reached the top, the tomato fight begins.

Source : holidaysgenius

2- Rules of the fight and other fabulous celebrations :

The festival brings other celebrations like fireworks, and massive Paella cooking take place in the Spanish town. Besides, the festival has some rules to respect the first one; they must crush the tomatoes before throwing for safety precautions. The second rule is no one allowed to bring into this fight bottles or hard objects that may cause someone into a more serious struggle. The third rule does not tear or throw tee-shirts and try to keep a safe distance from trucks and the last rule is to follow the directions of security staff.

3- Tomatoes acts like disinfectant :

Once the fights end, the participants and firefighters clean the streets from tomatoes by using fire trucks and people find water to wash at the Buñol River, as a result, the village streets look quite clean with the acidity of the tomato acting as the disinfectant.

Source : holidaysgenius

4- History of La Tomatina festival :

The Festival starts in the year 1945 when some youthful people passed the time in the town square to appear the Giants and big-heads figures ceremony. In addition, the teenage boys agreed to spend time in the ceremony with musicians. One of those youth made a member fell off and started to hit everything in his path.

Moreover, the youths picked some tomatoes from a vegetable store and started throwing them at him until the police arrived to break things up. The next year on the same month August these teenagers back to the town square, and began another tomato fight but this time by using their own tomatoes. Although the police and the local council intercede to break it down in the following years, it finally became an official festival in 1957 and the event continued to get bigger year after year.

5- Regeneration of La Tomatina festival in other countries :

La Tomatina has now become an enormous tourist attraction. People came from different parts of the World to visit this festival. Also La Tomatina festival recreated in many countries like Chicago, Costa Rica, Nevada and Columbia an effort to regenerate the festival in Bangalore, India, but they prohibited the event because of the over wastage of tomatoes.