Tomatina Festival Tomato Fight – Dale’s Daily Data [VIDEO]

It’s the world’s biggest food-fight: every year an estimated 30-thousand people descend on the Spanish town of Bunol to throw more than 240,000 pounds of tomatoes at each other and it’s always on the last Wednesday of August.

The festival starts with a ham-on-a-stick contest where competitors race up a pole to retrieve a smoked leg of ham.  When the ham is cut down, people put on eye protection while dump trucks pour loads of tomatoes onto the village streets. The crowd then start to pelt each other until all the tomatoes have been used up and the steets look like a big vat of tomato sauce.

The festival is called 'the Tomatina' and is basically a town-wide tomato fight.  How did it all start?  It was back in 1945 when a fight erupted between two young men at a carnival.  They went over to a vegetable stand in the town square and started throwing tomatoes at each other.  One year later, a group of young people met at the square, but this time they brought their own tomatoes and started another food-fight.

There were a couple of years where the village tried to put a stop to it, but with the addition of a few rules it was allowed to continue and is an annual tradition.

It has an official beginning and an official end and as long as everybody abides by the rules – anything goes.

Here's a sample of the some of the craziness during the Tomatina Festival -

SOURCE: tomatina.com