The highlight of the annual fiesta in Buñol is the tomato battle where thousands of participants, dressed in their worst clothes, pelt each other with ripe tomatoes. The local town council provide lorry loads of ripe tomatoes for the crowds to hurl at one another. No one is safe.The battle starts at 11a.m. and lasts for one hour.
If you can’t have a laugh at La Tomatina, there is probably no hope for you. Every year, on the last Wednesday in August between 11am and 1pm, the little town of Bunol in the east of Spain is almost literally painted red – by over 125,000 kilos of tomatoes.
The battle is supposed to have originated in 1944 when there was a battle between friends, but other rumours say that dissatisfied locals pelted civic dignitaries during a procession. As it becomes more well known there are more people attend and therefore more tomatoes are thrown!