Locals, tourists paint town red with tomatoes

Thousands of revellers — including many lured by a Bollywood film — descended on the small Spanish town of Buñol recently for the annual La Tomatina food fight, where they painted Buñol red with tons of overripe tomatoes.

Loaded trucks plodded through the crowd with people in their cargo beds throwing tomatoes at the revellers — who, in turn, hurled them at one another. Their white shirts soon turned pink and red while pop songs blasted from speakers. At one point, police appeared to use pepper spray to disperse an area of the crowd, but a festive vibe quickly resumed.

The messy melee took place for over an hour in the town, where buildings were covered with tarps ahead of the festivities. Held on the last Wednesday of August, the festival traces its origins to a food fight in 1945. La Tomatina became an annual tradition before Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco banned it in the 1950s. Televised media attention in the 1980s helped turn the festival into a national event and, eventually, an international attraction. More than 20,000 people had been expected to take part this year, with the Spanish news agency EFE reporting that roughly 40 per cent of participants over the past three years have been tourists from outside Spain.