BACK in combat after a three-year hiatus, the world's biggest food fight has had thousands painting the town red.
It's either your worst nightmare or the best fun you can have with your clothes on – clothes you'll never be able to wear again – the greatest stress-reliever outside of a luxury spa and the most carefree of abandonments you can achieve sober; but rather like paintballing and flour fights, nobody is 'on the fence' or 'lukewarm' about the Tomatina. It's either near the top of your bucket list, or it's something you'd move to another continent to avoid.
The 2022 Tomatina was eagerly awaited, having been called off since the 2019 edition due to the pandemic. The above picture appears to be near the start of this year's fruit fight, given that participants' clothes seem relatively clean and the tomatoes intact…
Always on the last Wednesday in August, and only on that day, the otherwise sleepy, unremarkable town of Buñol, about 20 kilometres west of Valencia city off the A-3 Madrid motorway, becomes the place where half the planet wants to be (or already is), and the other half just thinks is a bit silly. After all, it's the only town on earth which is famous for crowds hurling 130 tonnes of over-ripe tomatoes at each other purely for entertainment.
For the other 364-and-a-quarter days of the year, Buñol, with its excellent and close transport links to Spain's third-largest city, its attractive mountain scenery, quaintly-traditional central streets and outer urbanisations with swimming pools and cosmopolitan communities, does not typically draw in tourists by the crowd, other than passing day-trippers. Yet on Tomatina day, it's all over TV screens in Japan, the USA and Australia, whilst would-be telly-watchers from those countries are not even at home to see the coverage, because they're actually in Buñol.
Panorama of the town, taken by the tourism board for the district or shire, La Hoya de Buñol. It's quaint, picturesque, well connected and with beautiful countryside, but the reason for Buñol's massive tourist influx every year is just to throw fruit at each other in the street (photo: Turismolahoya.bunol.es)
It just looks like unsupervised, messy mayhem, a health and safety nightmare, a criminal waste of food, accidents waiting to happen and adults acting like children until it all ends in tears.
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