What happens when you give too many EU food subsidies to a country that thinks that burning effigies or a mass food fight in the centre of town are acceptable ways of honouring their Saints. The answer is La Tomatina, a tomato throwing ‘festival’ held in Buñol near Valencia on the last Wednesday of August, honouring San Luis Bertran and the Virgin Mary.
It was 2004 and for once the last Wednesday in August was as early as it could be, avoiding a clash with Lourdes where Luke and I were due the following week. We met Lawrence, a friend from Oxford, in Barcelona and hit the road in a Renault Vel Satis for Buñol. The idea of a speed limit on a Spanish motorway is like a broken pencil… pointless. The steering on the Vel Satis felt like it had been mounted on biscuits but four hours later we somehow arrived.
The first thing you realise about Buñol is that a town of 9,000 people having 30,000 people descend on it for one day a year means it’s about as well equipped to deal with it as a guy in a string vest, shorts and plimsols trying to go up Aconcagua. There’s nowhere to stay and, aside from a paella cook off, nothing to do. We realised a night in the car lay ahead. We tried to drink ourselves into unconsciousness and chose windows up and sleep in a sauna over windows down and get eaten alive by the mosquitoes or the antipodean backpackers camping outside. Sleep was a mere disco nap and around 8am, having woken up sweating like a foreskin in a synagogue, we headed into town.
The fiesta starts at 10am, but no tomatoes are thrown until a ham is recovered from the top of a greasy pole erected in the square. This takes over an hour as various groups of locals vainly try to get to the top. During this time I couldn’t help but wonder whether an especially hungry stripper would have been far more effective and been able to get the ham down in about three minutes/one song, but just then the first truck started rumbling along the narrow street.
Each dump truck releases about twenty metric tons of over-ripe tomatoes, grown in Extremadura especially for the fiesta. There are six in total and on the first whistle the free for all begins. If you’re a guy wearing a shirt, you won’t be for long and once the Spanish see pasty white skin you’ll be targeted more than a blader sitting down on a steep piste. The tomato fight lasts an hour and the nearby river is re-directed to flow straight through the centre of town. By the end there’s a dirty red mush floating in the road which looks like Jaws has just come up the drain and bitten half a dozen haemophiliacs.
Our contact lenses felt like they’d been taken straight out of a tramp’s catheter bag and put in our eyes. With tomato matted in our hair, permeating every pore and soaking every spec of clothing we began the trek back to the car. Some locals kindly pointed hoses onto the street. We arrived, took advantage of the showers set up next to the train station, binned our footwear and hit the road. Etiquette says you’re supposed to squash any ripe tomatoes you pick up before you throw them, but I still turned up in Lourdes three days later with two black eyes.
Can I recommend it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Only if I had worked up a tan in advance, stayed in Valencia the night before, had someone driving me there and back, had laser surgery to correct my myopia and brought more back-up. Who’s with me?
