Crush It First: The Rules of La Tomatina

At twelve o’clock today, in a small town about forty kilometres west of Valencia, somebody set off a firework. That was the signal. For exactly one hour, roughly twenty-two thousand people in the Plaza del Pueblo of Buñol threw tomatoes at one another until the streets ran ankle-deep in red.

At one o’clock a second rocket went up and everybody stopped. That is not a suggestion. Throwing after the second carcasa is the fastest way to be removed from the fiesta by people who have done this many times before.

The rule nobody remembers

Here is the thing first-timers always get wrong. You are supposed to crush the tomato in your hand before you throw it.

A whole tomato, thrown hard, is a projectile. It hurts. It has caused injuries. A crushed one is pulp and juice and slop, which is the entire point — the fun is in the mess, not the impact. So the instruction, repeated every year and ignored every year by somebody: squash it properly, then throw it with everything you have.

The rest of the rules are shorter. Do not tear anyone’s clothing. Keep clear of the lorries bringing the tomatoes in, because they are enormous and the crowd is not. Wear shoes you intend to throw away. Goggles are not cowardice; tomato acid in the eyes ends your morning.

It started as a scuffle

The origin story is gloriously unimpressive. In 1945, during a parade in Buñol, some young lads tried to muscle into the procession, a scuffle broke out near a vegetable stall, and the nearest available ammunition happened to be tomatoes.

They came back and did it again the next year. The authorities banned it more than once. It kept happening anyway, which is roughly how most durable Spanish traditions establish themselves — not by decree but by a town collectively refusing to stop. By the 1980s a television report had carried it to the rest of the country, and from there to the rest of the world.

Before the tomatoes: a ham on a greased pole

The battle is only an hour, but the day starts around ten with the palo jabón: a tall wooden post smeared thickly with soap, with a ham tied at the top.

People climb on each other’s shoulders and slide back down, repeatedly, for an hour or so, while the crowd sings and throws water. Occasionally somebody gets the ham. Occasionally nobody does and the tomatoes arrive anyway.

If you want a single image that explains Spanish festival logic, it is this: a difficult, undignified, faintly absurd task, undertaken enthusiastically by a large group of adults, with a leg of cured pork as the prize.

The numbers

Reported figures vary a little between sources, but the scale is consistent: somewhere in the region of 120,000 kilos of tomatoes, brought in on lorries, and a participant cap of around 22,000. Entry has been ticketed since 2013 — before that the crowds became genuinely unsafe.

And no, it is not food waste in the way people assume. The tomatoes are a low-grade variety grown specifically for the fiesta, picked overripe and soft. They were never destined for anyone’s salad.

The part nobody photographs

What happens after one o’clock is, in its own way, more impressive than what happens before it.

The fire brigade turns the hoses on the streets and on the people. Residents who have spent the morning behind plastic sheeting come out and help. The acidity of the tomato leaves the paving stones cleaner than they were at breakfast. Within a couple of hours Buñol looks like a normal Valencian town on a hot Wednesday afternoon, and thousands of people walk to the river to rinse off before getting on coaches back to the coast.

This year there was an addition: Spanish public television covered the whole thing live for the first time, with cameras across the town and a drone overhead. A fight between neighbours in 1945, broadcast to the nation in real time eighty-odd years later.

The Spanish you will actually hear

Fiesta vocabulary is some of the most useful Spanish there is, because it turns up nowhere in a textbook and everywhere in real life.

• La carcasa — the firework shell that starts and ends the battle. Any Spanish festival worth attending is punctuated by loud bangs at scheduled times.
• El palo jabón — literally “the soap pole”. Jabón is soap; you will need the word again in every shower in Spain.
• ¡Aplástalo! — “Crush it!” The pronoun sticks onto the end of a positive command, and the stress mark appears to keep the pronunciation put.
• Empapado — soaked through. Far more common than the textbook mojado when you are properly drenched.
• El pueblo — the town, and also the people of it. The same word doing both jobs tells you something about how Spain thinks about towns.
• ¡Qué locura! — “What madness!” The correct thing to say roughly once an hour at any Spanish fiesta, and it works as approval.

If you are thinking about next year

It falls on the last Wednesday of August, so 2027 is the 25th. Tickets sell out. Stay in Valencia and travel in; Buñol is a small town and it is not pretending otherwise.

Bring nothing you care about. Leave your phone somewhere sealed or accept its death. Old trainers, goggles, a shirt you are ready to bin.

And crush the tomato first. Everyone will tell you. Somebody will still throw a whole one at the back of your head.

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Spanish fiestas make far more sense when you can follow what is being shouted. Parlazo connects you with vetted Spanish tutors for one-to-one video lessons — pay for the lessons you take, nothing else. Start with the vocabulary nobody puts in a textbook.

Further reading: El País reported from Buñol on the day — “La Tomatina de hoy, tan divertida y tan loca como siempre” (in Spanish). Photograph: La Tomatina 2010 by flydime, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.