Search engine honours 70th edition of food fight festival in Spanish town of Buñol, which does not actually grow tomatoes
La Tomatina is a strange festival. It attracts tens of thousands of tourists to take part in a tomato-throwing tradition in a Spanish town that does not actually grow tomatoes.
The world’s largest food fight – whose 70th anniversary edition, beginning on Wednesday, is being celebrated via a Google doodle – has an origin thick with mystery.
Two boys are said to have tossed tomatoes at a parade to honour the town of Buñol’s patron saint, but the reasoning has ranged from being a saucy protest at Franco’s regime or simply two macho teenagers seeing red.
Today, it is tourism, not tomatoes, that is the motivation for the continued celebration. The town’s agriculture is based in almonds, grapes and olives, not tomatoes, and officials import them from Extremadura.
The festival was free for participants from 1945 to 2012, but in 2013 the mayor of Buñol, Joaquín Masmano Palmer, imposed a €10 entry fee to help the recession-hit town defray its costs in tomatoes and policing, and also to keep the number of visitors down.
This year the town plans for a record 150 tonnes of tomatoes, squished first to avoid injuries, and will launch its first ever tomato-based obstacle course, the Tomatina race.
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