Self catering apartment - La Tomatina

La Tomatina, Tomato Festival Spain, in Bunol near Valencia is essentially the world’s biggest food fight and you can see it all from your self catering apartment in Spain. The last Wednesday in August, Bunol’s population more than triples as people crowd the town square and pelt one another with tomatoes!

More than that, La Tomatina, the great Tomato Festival, includes music, dancing, parades, fireworks and a lovely paella cook-off; all fantastic reasons to book your ideal self catering apartment in Spain with VillasPeople.com. You can see one excellent example of many La Tomatina pictures to the left.

La Tomatina & Extremadura tomatoes

The usually quiet town of Bunol is anything but as it hosts the messiest event ever; La Tomatina. Since the mid-1940s La Tomatina has taken place on the last Wednesday in August and you can find the perfect self catering apartment in Spain to make your holiday all the more comfortable.

At approximately 11am a tall greased poll is put up with a ham staked to the top. La Tomatina can begin only after someone shimmies up the poll and brings down the ham. People start climbing over each other to clamber up this slippery pole creating much laughter throughout the crowd.

Water cannon signal start

After the ham is claimed, a water cannon goes off signalling the beginning of La Tomatina. Lorries are set throughout the square bursting with Extremadura tomatoes (less expensive!). Chaos, pandemonium, bedlam and mayhem all aptly describe what La Tomatina looks like!

La Tomatina clean-up

After approximately 2 hours the tomatoes cease to be fired when the second water cannon goes off. Fire trucks squeeze their way into the street and the cleanup begins. Most shop keepers prepare beforehand by covering windows and doors with huge sheets of plastic.

Many of the people covered in squished tomato bits make their way down to the Bunol River to wash up. Sometimes you can get lucky with a nice resident willing to spray you off with their own garden hose!

La Tomatina rules

There actually are rules to this madness, actual La Tomatina Rules! All tomatoes must be squashed before they are thrown as it is less painful. No glass bottles or other implements/weapons that may lead to a more serious ruckus can be brought into the square. No tearing of other people’s clothing - women: be extremely careful anyway! Absolutely no more tomatoes can be thrown after the second water cannon is fired.

The Story of La Tomatina

The origin of the first La Tomatina is a much debated subject. There are so many different accounts of how the first tomato came to ever be thrown, that part of the festival and merriment seems to be in storytelling!

One account tells of a tone deaf music man wandering through the square. He was so bad people threw fruits and veggies at him! Another is of a crowd of people less than impressed by their councilmen who took action by hurling tomatoes at them during a festival. Yet another tells of people fornicating in public and city officials stopping them by throwing tomatoes.

One last one to mention takes place during a parade of Gigantes, massive heads carried in a parade. Onlookers wanted to get involved in the parade and in so doing pushed their way into it and knocked over a member of the parade. Upon regaining his footing he began a fight. The fight reached its pinnacle when people found a nearby produce cart and took the tomatoes from it and began throwing them. The rest, as they say, is history.