Food Fight! La Tomatina Rolls Into Spain Again

It seems nothing could be finer than to be a young man in Spain in the summertime. First, they have the running of the bulls, and just when you are recovering from that, comes La Tomatino, a state-sanctioned, rotten tomato fight that fills the downtown streets of Bunol in Valencia. It kicked off today with truckloads of rotten tomatoes hauled in for the amusement of revelers to slosh around in until the entire town looked like a bloodbath. But the question remains: Why? From latomatina.org:

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.

Whatever the reason, the festival now brings tens of thousands of visitors to the otherwise sleepy town of 9,000. That’s good for the economy, though maybe not so good for the tomatoes.

Click on the image below to see a gallery of pictures from La Tomatina Festival in Bunol, Spain.

Images [Winnepeg Sun]