Advertisement
Published: February 5th 2007
For those of you that may not know, in a little village called Bunol (about 40K from Valencia), the largest food fight in the world is held every year. Thousands of people manage to get over to it, and this year, we were two of the lucky people.
Having heard that the cost of accomodation in Valencia is hugely inflated at this time of year, we decided to travel out of the city and stay in a place called Mareny de Barraquettes on the Playa de Sueca. We took a tent and set ourself up camping on the beach for a week.
The campsite itself seemed like it was a second home for many Spanish people - probably heading out of the city to get away from the likes of us! Very little English was spoken by anyone in the village, and we somehow got by with broken French, a spanish accent, lots of pointing, and raising our voice at the end of every sentence. A simple task like buying camping gas turned into a half an hour mission but that didn't matter though because nobody was in a rush. You gotta love the manyana Spanish attitude to life.....
"You've been robbed have you sir? Ah well, we'll just have a little siesta first, and worry about it in the morning!"
We baked on the beach, went to a water park, drunk litre bottles of San Miguel, ate freshly baked foccacia, and just relaxed for a while before removing all valuables, putting on goggles, and making the journey to Bunol for the debauchery of La Tomatina.
The trains get pretty packed so it's best to get there as early as you can. It all kicks off at 11am so try to leave Valencia about 9am if you want to get into the heart of the fight. The population of Bunol swells from 9,000 to 30,000 and the streets are pretty narrow so avoid the place like the plague if you're claustrophobic.
There's a weird thing that happens where some local dude tries to get a ham down from the top of a lamp post. Don't know what that's all about but soon after it 250,000 overripe tomatoes are poured into the street and it begins. The tomatoes don't hurt at all, it's clothing that causes the most amount of pain. Within 10 minutes, you have lost
both your shoes, and have been smacked around the head with about 20 tomato-sodden t-shirts. The great thing about people throwing shoes is that you can wear them to get home in afterwards!
The fight lasts about 2 hours, and then the streets are pressure washed down. You can always find some friendly spanish guy that will pressure wash you as well to get the horrible stench of tomato off of your skin and out of your hair. What they don't tell you is that you are not allowed back on the train to Valencia unless you're wearing clean clothes, so luckily we left a spare set of clothes in one of the luggage lockers around the town beforehand.
WARNING - You will stink of tomatoes for about 3 days afterwards, no matter how much you shower.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.039s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0201s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Cheesey!!
non-member comment
we got smashed too!!
Yes we got smashed by big fat tom toms too!! Sooooo much fun is that of La Tomatina. I was there also when Sal and Sam were. Lots of tomatos and lots of crazy loose peolpe! You definalty need to be wearing lots of layers if your a girl as i had 2 of my 3 tops ripped off by a dirty little Spanish punk. You also have to make sure you are wearing clothes to get back on the train. Sad for the dude i met who was naked appart from his cooking apron!! Highly recommend going if you have the chance x x