"La Tomatina" Tomato Festival Photos - Spain, 2010...
La Tomatina festival in Spain gives new meaning to the expression ‘playing with your food’. For most of the year Bunol is a ho-hum industrial town, 40km (25mi) from Valencia, quietly going about its own business. But come the last Wednesday of August, the town’s streets turns into a salsa riot, with over 20,000 revellers pelting each other with large, red, squishy tomatoes. There are lots of theories on how the festival started; one is that it began in 1945 with anti-Franco protests, although any link between Franco and tomatoes remains ambigous. Another theory is that it started when two friends had a stand-up knock-down argument while sharing a meal. The argument quickly reached food-throwing proportions, infected acquaintances and nearby diners, moved out into the street, spread through the suburbs, progressed to neighbouring towns and eventually wound up as an annual event that attracted ‘mata throwers from all corners of the the world. At around 10 a.m., the first event of the Tom
