By Dave Martins, March 15, 2010
You may think I'm making this up, but it's true: there is something held in Spain every year called the Tomatina Festival, where a small town, Bunol, is taken over by thousands of people throwing ripe tomatoes at each other. I'm dead serious.
The tomatoes are trucked in free (last year, 240,000 pounds), and thousands of people select the ripe juicy fruit and, at a given signal, start pelting tomatoes left and right at everyone and anything in sight. Basically, it is a friendly food fight. The barrage lasts for two to three hours – storefronts are covered with plastic – and no one and nothing is off limits. It is a ripe tomato war, done in a spirit of fun, and the whole place, along with the people, ends up in one huge, red, pulpy mess.
Apparently, it started with some angry person throwing a tomato in some celebration years ago, and someone throwing something back, and it has grown into what is now an annual tomato pelting festival. Bunol is small, only 9,000 people, but it swells to 30,000 for the Tomatina and the town is jammed. If you think I'm nuts, google Tomatina Festival and see for yourself.
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