La Tomatina festival, The largest food fight in the world

The festival of La Tomatina has become one of the highlights of Spain’s summer festival calendar With a large number of people came from all over the world to take part in this largest food fight, where more than hundred metric tons of tomatoes thrown on each other and in the streets.

A slice of ham marks the beginning of the festival :

La Tomatina was a food fight festival held on every last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region in Spain. The tomatoes used here are low-quality and less expensive from a place called Extremadura. Also, every year about 40,000 lovers travel to the town of Buñol just for have fun and throwing tomatoes at each other. Usually, the event lasts for an hour; many trucks haul the bounty of tomatoes into the center of the town Plaza Del Pueblo. In addition, a slice of ham was hung on the top of a fat pole in the already crowded town square called the ‘palo jabón’. The purpose is to climb and get this slice of ham with the crowd chanting and singing while being showered by water hoses when someone is able to climb to the top and bring the slice of ham from the pole the tomato fight begins.

Source : holidaysgenius

Rules of the fight and other fabulous celebrations :

Moreover, the festival brings other celebrations during the festival as well fireworks, and massive Paella cooking take place in the Spanish town. Furthermore, the festival has some rules to respect the first one; they must crush the tomatoes before throwing for safety precautions. The second rule is that 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.

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

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.

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.