La Tomatina: A Spanish festival that reminds us of Holi
Ever since Indian filmmaker Zoya Akhtar’s popular movie ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ released in 2011, Indian adventure lovers have added the Spanish festival of La Tomatina to their bucket list. We bet it’s on yours as well!
La Tomatina, better known as the ‘tomato throwing festival’, is held annually on the last Wednesday of August, in the town of Buñol in the Spanish province of Valencia. Although the backstory of this festival is largely unknown, it originated way back in the 1940s when a group of local teenagers engaged in a random food fight, right after a religious celebration.
A feisty festival
Calle del Cid, the main square of Bunol, is where the madness and mayhem ensues. At around 9 in the morning, a large pole with a piece of ham attached to one end of it is greased and hoisted into the air. People chaotically scramble and struggle against each other to pull this ham down. At around 11am, regardless of whether someone got the ham down (which is rare), a cannon shot is fired and over 120 tonnes of ripe, red, squishy tomatoes are tipped from trucks onto the streets and the waiting crowd. For the next one hour, everyone joins in this cheerful, messy, anarchic tomato battle until a second cannon fire signals the end of the fun. After that? People make a crazy dash for the closest local house waiting with a garden hose to water down all the tomato squash they are covered in!
So, the next time you want to taste the flavour of Holi, but beyond the borders of India, maybe plan a trip to Buñol!
Open to international tourists
Now a globally validated festival with the tag of ‘Fiesta of International Tourist Interest,’ not many of us know that tomato throwing was banned by the government until 1959 when the locals showed their unanimous dismay and took part in a ceremonial tomato burial. Since then, every August, Spaniards have come together to celebrate by throwing tomatoes at each other. In fact, 2012 onwards, La Tomatina has been open to national and international tourists (entry fees are charged) and is said to have more than 20000 participants on an average each year. You won’t believe the amount of tomatoes Buñol imports for this hour-long event. It stands at an approximate 319000 pounds! Yes, you read that right!
History of La Tomatina
Buñol is a small township in the Spanish province of Valencia, where the population was not more than 6000 during the 1940s. Therefore, believe it or not, it is extremely unlikely that a local tomato throwing event would have garnered even national, let alone international attention. As a result, the real origin of La Tomatina is still a point of debate. However, there is more than one popular backstory surrounding this messy, red festival.
According to one story, a group of teenagers got involved in a food fight following a religious celebratory meal. However, they mistakenly knocked over a passerby while haphazardly throwing tomatoes at one other, left behind by a lorry carrying the fruit (yes, tomato is a fruit) in bulk. Well, as it happened, the man retaliated and hundreds other joined just for the fun of it Little did they know that they were creating history of what later would turn out to be Spain’s most sought-after festival.
Another popular origin story surrounding the Spanish tomato throwing festival is that, during the early 1940s, the local Corpus Christi celebration (a Catholic festival observed in the honour of Christ’s physical presence), a singer gave such a poor performance that the locals expressed their discontent by throwing tomatoes at the singer as a sign of protest, fetching them from the vendor’s market nearby. Understandable, yet disgusting!
Whatever may have been the reason it started, it was not until the 1950s that La Tomatina had gained sufficient popularity across Spain. In the 1980s that the tomato throwing festival reached international borders when it was televised for the first time in 1983.