For everyone who’s ever heard of this festival I’m sure it’s already in your bucket list. but for those of you who’ve never heard of it, here’s a little history behind the party: La Tomatina is a Festival held in Bunyol, a town in Valencia, since 1945. It all started with some guys trying to take part in the Giants and Big-Heads figures parade and accidentally making one of the official participants fall, who, in a fit of rage, started hitting and throwing everything at his sight. A vegetable market happened to be in his path so he started throwing tomatoes at them and eventually everybody joined the tomato war. The following year people brought tomatoes from their houses to start the tomato war again and even though the festivity has been banned and unbanned throughout the years, eventually it became the town’s official festival. Nowadays, there’s a test to pass before starting the tomato war: the participants must climb a soaped-up pole to try to reach a serrano ham on top of it. When somebody finally catches the ham, the tomatina begins with the sound of a fire cracker. Four trucks loaded with around 150.000 kilos of tomatoes enter the streets and the staff starts throwing tomatoes at the crowds who will grab those tomatoes and start throwing them at each other for over an hour! Regarding the tomatoes used during la tomatina, these are inedible and most of them even rotten, so if not used for this event they would be thrown away. The money raised in this festival is destined for humanitarian causes such as the fight against homophobia (2015) and violence against women (2019). Hope you guys like it
