Why does Buñol hold a festival where everyone becomes tomato-red?

For one hour, a quiet town turns into a bright red storm.

Buñol is a small town near Valencia that spends most of the year like many other Spanish towns: calm streets, cafés, school runs, the usual rhythm. Then, on one late-summer day, it hosts La Tomatina, a tomato fight so famous that the whole place briefly looks as if it has been dipped in red paint.

The tomatoes are meant to be squashed first

Crushing them reduces impact and makes the fight more like a splash than a hit.

The festival began as an accident. The most repeated story is that in the mid 1940s, a scuffle during a local parade or street event ended with people grabbing nearby tomatoes and throwing them. It was messy, funny, and strangely satisfying. The idea returned the next year, and then again. Over time, Buñol’s residents leaned into it and turned a spontaneous food fight into a planned tradition.

Tickets changed the festival’s scale

In recent years, entry limits and ticketing have been used to control crowd size and improve safety.

Today, it is tightly organised. Trucks dump huge loads of soft, overripe tomatoes into the centre, and the fight runs for about an hour. The tomatoes are chosen because they are cheap, squishy, and not suitable for selling. There are also rules: squash the tomato before throwing, do not bring hard objects, and respect others. When the signal ends, the throwing stops, and the town switches into clean-up mode. Fire hoses and water trucks wash the streets, and the crowd scrubs off the red pulp. By afternoon, the same lanes look almost normal again.

The streets get cleaned fast

Once it ends, hoses, water trucks, and thousands of feet do the work, and the town resets surprisingly quickly.

At its core, La Tomatina is less about tomatoes and more about permission. A day when adults play like children, strangers laugh together, and the town becomes a shared memory rather than just a place on a map.