George Carlin once said that he didn’t like tomatoes because, with their larval appearance, they just don’t seem done.
Carlin undoubtedly would not like Spain’s annual tomato festival, La Tomatina, then. Simply put, La Tomatina is the world’s largest tomato fight. On the last Wednesday in August, between 30,000 and 40,000 tourists descend on Bunol, a surprisingly small village in Eastern Spain. Aside from some ancillary activities, the center of the festival is a one-hour, midday period in which attendees hurl 10 tons of ripe tomatoes at each other.
With uncertain origins (the most common story has the tradition generating from a spontaneous food fight in the 1940s) and a striking lack of structure, La Tomatina has become one of Spain’s most famous festivals, right after Pamplona’s running of the bulls.
Most La Tomatina participants stay in nearby Valencia and take a train to Buñol the morning of the festival. As my friend and I staked out a place in line for the train at about 7 a.m., we spoke with the other eager festivalgoers, some of whom had come from as far away as Japan. Most admitted that they had planned their trip around La Tomatina, which made the very-real prospect of not getting a train and missing the whole thing a bit scary.
Upon arriving in Buñol, everyone was bedecked in pretty ratty digs, considering most participants intended to throw out their clothes later that day. We eventually crowded into the Plaza del Pueblo, which is more of a narrow street than a plaza. Everyone’s attention was directed at a greased pole with a ham hanging from the top. The tomatoes are not released until someone successfully climbs the pole and knocks down the meat. Roughly 30 people took an hour to displace the ham, a process that toggled between somewhat organized and pure chaos.
After an impromptu T-shirt fight, the tomatoes were released. The slimy vegetables make it through the crowd via oversized dump trucks. Dignitaries stand atop the trucks and hurl tomatoes downward, and the trucks dump some of their loads every 50 feet or so. With each truck that goes by (I counted a total of four), the fight escalates. Many participants brought goggles, a move recommended if you’re the type of person who doesn’t like intense physical pain caused by eye trauma.
The hardest thing to describe about the event was the smell, a sour cocktail of 10 tons of crushed tomatoes and 40,000 helpings of body odor, all under the hot sun.
Many of the participants I talked with seemed to consider La Tomatina an unofficial companion piece to the running of
the bulls.
“The two events are similar in some ways: they’re both world-known, people from all over the world gather in a small Spanish town,” said Chris Milosevich, an American tourist who attended both festivals. “The tomato festival is much safer. The running of the bulls is a step up because of the danger factor. The tomato festival can get pretty crazy, but it’s essentially harmless.”
Next to the frequent deaths in Pamplona, La Tomatina may seem tame by comparison. However, it can safely be called one of the messiest celebrations on Earth, even if the participants don’t really know what they’re celebrating.
One of the most surprising things about the event — given its Mardi Gras atmosphere and the innate violence of the tomato fight — was the good vibes among the crowd (where else would dropping a handful of tomato entrails down a member-of-the opposite-sex’s pants be considered flirting?). Spaniards probably wonder why we (as Americans) can’t hold an event this big without a magnitude of police, fistfights and arrests.
So why would a person travel across the globe to participate in something like this? Novelty, curiosity, the liberating effects of large-scale silliness. The answers are numerous. However, most festivalgoers would probably agree on one reason: the giddy exhilaration of doing something so completely different.