¨La Tomatina¨ - see also hotels near the Tomato Fight Festival

August. Bunol. Valencia.

Every year people descend on the Spanish town of Bunol (in the Valencia region of Spain) to throw more than 240,000 pounds of tomatoes at each other as part of the La Tomatina festival.

This is the world’s biggest food fight - an hour of tomato-slinging warfare. Shops and businesses cover up to protect from the messy onslaught of red pulp before lorries arrive to dump ripe tomatoes for participants to sling at each other.

This is one fiesta that’s just messy fun for the sake of it - there’s no political or religious background. The ritual started in 1944 during the town’s annual fiestas when two rival groups of youths fought with each other using ammunition from an overturned vegetable stall.

Each year since then, La Tomatina has grown bigger and amazingly, it now attracts 20,000 revellers.

For details of other festivals