Reportage - La Tomatina Festival 2011 (25 images)

Around 45.000 revelers from all over the world came together at Bunol, Spain to participate in the annual food fight La Tomatina (tomato throwing festival) on August 31, 2011. More than 120 tons of tomatoes brought from Extremadura were used. Local lore says the tradition began in the mid-40s with a fight that broke out near a vegetable stand at the town square.

La Tomatina is a food-fight festival celebrated annually every last Wednesday of August in the Spanish town of Bunol,...
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Around 45.000 revelers from all over the world came together at Bunol, Spain to participate in the annual food fight La Tomatina (tomato throwing festival) on August 31, 2011. More than 120 tons of tomatoes brought from Extremadura were used. Local lore says the tradition began in the mid-40s with a fight that broke out near a vegetable stand at the town square.

La Tomatina is a food-fight festival celebrated annually every last Wednesday of August in the Spanish town of Bunol, near Valencia. Thousands of participants come together from all over the world to pelt mercilessly fellow revelers with ripe tomatoes, hurling them at each other in a brutal battle where streets end up flooded with dark red tomato pulp.

This picturesque tradition originated back in 1945 when some youngsters attacked city councilmen with tomatoes during a town celebration. By a quirk of fate, there was a vegetable stand nearby. The following year, young people repeated the battle voluntarily bringing their own tomatoes from home.

Though the politicians banned the celebration in the successive years, those young men had made history. La Tomatina was banned in the early 50's but it did not deter its participants, some of them even got arrested. The festivity was forbidden again in 1955. The neighbors organized a protest, staging a funeral of a tomato: a demonstration in which the neighbors carried a coffin with a big tomato inside.
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