The world’s biggest tomato fight was supposed to be celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2020, but like practically all fiestas this year, has been called off due to the pandemic.
However, Buñol town council is calling for fans of the festival all over the world to take part in the #TomatinaChallenge – videoing themselves being hit by ripe tomatoes or hurling tomato juice over themselves, uploading the footage on social media, and emailing it to: prensa@latomatina.info.
All entries will be placed into a draw and the first 10 chosen will earn their ‘filmakers’ two tickets each for next year’s Tomatina, and 10 commemorative mugs.
Safety and avoiding destruction of other people’s, or public, property is paramount: If you take videos of yourself chucking tomatoes at people on the street, you’ll probably be fined, and so you should be; mask-wearing, social distancing and stringent hygiene measures mean it is more crucial than ever to avoid pulling a Tomatina-style stunt in public.
But a tomatoey version of the ‘ice-bucket challenge’ on your own terrace or garden could work instead. It does not have to be messy, though, say the organisers: dressing up the kids in tomato costumes, filming your tomato plants or tomato-based lunch might also fit the bill.
Videos should be horizontal, or landscape, rather than vertical or portrait, since they need to be uniform – the council wants to put them all together to make a full-length, commemorative 75th anniversary ‘documentary’.
Buñol, a town of approximately 11,000 inhabitants around 20 kilometres west of Valencia off the A-3 Madrid motorway, is famous on every continent for its mucky festival, which is believed to have started after a group of youths at the weekly fruit-and-veg market became bored and started hurling tomatoes at each other.
In recent years, tickets carrying a small charge have been issued with a limit on numbers, since the festival was becoming so famous and widely-supported that there simply was not room for everyone who wanted to travel over to Spain for precisely that reason.
The town’s population typically doubles or trebles on the last Wednesday in August, when the Tomatina is celebrated, with up to 90 percnet of residents joining in and the others coming from as far away as Australia and Japan.
In fact, the Tomatina is so huge that it has its own councillor. María Vallés is the current ‘councillor for Tomatina affairs’ and is running this year’s ‘virtual version’ and competition.
She fervently hopes next year’s will be able to go ahead as usual.
Anyone already planning to make their Tomatina début in 2021 should remember to set aside clothing they will never wear again – you won’t get the stains out, no matter how hard you try – and goggles are also a good idea, even though throwing tomatoes at faces or heads, or pulling at others’ garments, is not allowed.
Showers are on site to clean off the worst of the typical 145 tonnes of overripe tomatoes unloaded into the central square at 11am on the dot – and, miraculously, thanks to dedicated street cleaners, every last drop of the planet’s largest open-air bowl of gazpacho has been hoovered up or washed away by the following day.