La Tomatina 70th Anniversary
There isn’t a definitive history
of how the event got started. Some believe it happened when two young boys got
into a fight during a local parade before they began lobbing tomatoes from a
local vegetable stand at each other. Others believe that the tomatoes were
thrown in protest against an unfavorable decision made by the city council, or
launched at a particularly bad local musician. What the storytellers in the
quaint Spanish town of just 10,000 people all agree on, though, is that the
annual act of throwing tomatoes at each other for fun began in 1945 on the last
Wednesday in August.
While there was no official event until years later, locals
from the small town decided to meet annually, bringing their own tomatoes to
the fight. Time and time again, however, police and local leaders attempted to
have the whole event canned, apparently upset with the waste of food and the
mess it made of the town.
During the peak of the
Franco dictatorship in the 1960s, which ended in 1975, La Tomatina was banned,
as it had no religious significance. But once Franco’s reign ended, San Luis
Bertran, the local patron of the town, began organizing the event and even
supplied the tomatoes for locals to throw. It wasn’t until 1980 that the local
council took control of the event and the modern La Tomatina festival was
born.
In
2002, the event was declared an official festival by the Spanish Department of
Tourism because of its overwhelming success.
The day, which starts at 11 a.m. and uses around 150,000
tomatoes, cannot begin until a participant climbs up a greasy pole in the town
square and retrieves a ham that is attached to the top. Once the ham is down,
the throwing can begin. Since 2013, a fee of $12 is charged to take part in the event.
Participation capacity has been reduced from 50,000 to around 22,000
for safety reasons.
All around Buñol
on the last Wednesday of every August, storefronts are shuttered. Trucks hauling
thousands of pounds of tomatoes grown and harvested specifically for this day
head for Plaza del Pueblo, the town square, where a Spanish ham is
suspended from the top of a greased pole. What ensues once this ham is
successfully retrieved (or not retrieved, as is often the case, by a succession
of hapless climbers) is arguably the world’s largest food fight: La Tomatina.
For a moment of blissful, heartwarmingly innocuous chaos, tens of thousands of
visitors to this small Spanish town indulge a universal childhood fantasy and
shower each other with tomatoes in a wild, watery mess.
For its 70th anniversary, Doodler Nate
Swinehart captures the energy of today’s festivities with an animation awash in
splattered tomatoes and brimming with the youthful delight of its characters.
