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Buñol

Tomato Fight!

mike elkin

Whether the Americans to my right said “tomayto” or the Brits to my left said “tomahto,” what mattered was throwing as many tomatoes as possible. Behold La Tomatina, a gladiatorial tomato food fight in the village of Buñol. It’s a vegetarian warrior’s dream.

Imagine a junior-high cafeteria food fight. Now imagine the entire junior-high class participating in the food fight. Now imagine everyone from the elementary and high schools pitching in, too. Now imagine being outside, and that everything on the tables, from the sloppy joes to the foot-long hot dogs, is tomatoes. As the cliché goes, the streets ran red that day.

I had been traveling through Andalusia when a friend in Madrid invited me to join his gang heading to Buñol, about 20 miles west of Valencia. The tomato fight there takes place annually, on the last Wednesday of August. My instructions were to bring a bathing suit and shoes that I wouldn’t mind destroying. Off I went.

The village was not unlike other small Spanish villages in the region: a few narrow, cobblestone streets winding around whitewashed houses baking in the summer heat. But that week, thousands of Spaniards, Brits, Germans, Americans and Japanese flocked to the village for the tomato fight and the week-long festival that had grown up around it. We arrived in Buñol the morning of the fight and eagerly joined the rank and file for a breakfast of beer and tapas. As noon approached, the masses squeezed into the tiny plaza like clowns into a car, while the locals unfurled gigantic plastic sheets from their roofs to protect the buildings’ façades.

Suddenly a blast of water hit me straight on. People were spraying us with high-pressure water cannons, the kind used to remove barnacles from century-old ships, or anti-globalization protesters from international summits. Then Spaniards on rooftops began tossing buckets of water on unsuspecting people below. From 30 feet, that’s no sprinkle.

An unwritten rule decreed T-shirts were not allowed. “So let me help you remove that shirt, kind sir or madam,” the friendly mob would say, and proceed to tear the thing from your body. Then they’d tie the fragments of your former shirt into knots and fling the wet cloth at high speeds into the crowd. Turning my head at an inopportune moment, one caught my eye, whipping my head back like a Pez dispenser and busting a blood vessel.

I knelt down in pain. But there was no rest for me. A loud cannon shot silenced the crowd, and then the grinding of truck gears up the road ignited the atmosphere again. Six large dump trucks, bursting with soggy tomatoes, made their way into the plaza and unloaded their ammunition. Mayhem erupted as thousands of revelers snatched up tomatoes from the ground and hurled them at their neighbors. A friend gave me swimming goggles to protect me from the blinding tomato juice, but they just got caked with tomato bits. Off they came. My eyes stung, but I couldn’t dwell on it—there were tomatoes to be thrown.

My instructions were to bring a bathing suit and shoes that I wouldn’t mind destroying. Off I went.

Soon, more truck engines were heard over the screams and shouts. The melee stopped and the crowd parted, each side eying the other like gunfighters, just waiting for the trucks to finish unloading before unleashing another vegetable fury.

Our foes were not only the half-naked savages around us, but also local kids taunting playfully from unprotected windows. Someone would shout and point to a nearby window, and a group of us would instinctively swivel, aim and fire at the offender who was not brave enough to take to the battlefield.

On we fought, the adrenaline running faster than the tomato juice in the gutters. Most food fights last a few minutes; La Tomatina runs a full hour. This may not be a long time for geologists or Teamsters, but when you’re wading up to your knees in reddish sludge while thousands of people chuck about 90,000 pounds of tomatoes at you, it’s exhausting.

When the cannon roared again, we all dropped our tomatoes, applauded, cheered, and embraced our neighbors. I collapsed where I stood. Gradually, I staggered down the road to a wide-open space where the town had organized communal showers. Still, I was picking tomato bits from bodily crevices for weeks after.

A Spaniard told me later not to bother. By the time I finished cleaning myself, he said, it would be time for another Tomatina.

AFTER TRAVELING through Western Europe in college, Mike Elkin decided to make Spain his home, working as a freelance journalist in Madrid for three years. Now on a brief break in Dublin, Mike yearns for Spanish food—even some tomatoes.