The Origins of La Tomatina, Spain's Tomato-Throwing Festival

Every year on the last Wednesday of August, the quiet town of Buñol, Spain, explodes into a riot of red during La Tomatina, the world’s largest tomato-throwing festival. What started as a spontaneous 1940s food fight during a local parade has become an internationally celebrated spectacle. Today, more than 20,000 revelers from around the world descend on Buñol to hurl, smash and splatter more than 320,000 pounds of tomatoes in an hour-long frenzy of rebellion, community and fun. 

While the exact origins of La Tomatina remain unconfirmed, most accounts trace the now-legendary tomato fight to August 1945. At the time, it was just a raucous scuffle among local boys, so impromptu and unruly that few imagined it would one day explode into a global spectacle—or thought to write it down. As a result, the story has been pieced together largely through oral history, note historians Enric Cuenca Yxeres and Vicent Giménez Chornet in their 2018 study “La Tomatina de Buñol: The Internationalization of a Popular Festival,” published in the journal Cultura y Representaciones Sociales. 

Life in Buñol at the time, like much of Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, was marked by political repression, economic hardship and the sweeping rollback of social and political progress.

During Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975), “all the progressive reforms of the 1930s—from labor rights to female suffrage, abortion and divorce laws, and regional autonomy for Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia—were undone,” says Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies at Oberlin College. Under Franco’s authoritarian regime, many Spaniards were exiled, imprisoned or punished, while his policies ushered in years of scarcity, poverty and, at times, famine. 

As Yxeres and Chornet recount, it was the last Wednesday of August 1945 when a group of local boys showed up at Buñol’s town square for a traditional parade of “giants and big heads” honoring the town’s patron saint. Tensions were already simmering: The town council had chosen one group of boys to carry the parade paraphernalia, while rejecting another. These boys belonged to the latter. According to the oral history, Yxeres and Chornet write, one youth may have shoved one of the towering papier-mâché figures in protest, prompting another to snatch a tomato from a nearby market stall and hurl it. The ensuing food fight lasted until police intervened. 

One of the boys caught up in that chaotic skirmish was Goltrán Zanón. His daughter, Maria Jose Zanón, told the BBC’s “Witness History” it all started as a harmless prank. “Today, you have so many options of things to do for fun, but back then there was hunger and poverty,” she said. “Franco's regime was very strict, so I think that this was a rebellion against the council, the police and all of that.”

Although authorities canceled the parade the next year to prevent another food fight, the group of boys returned anyway, armed with tomatoes. “They brought tomatoes from home and repeated the experience year after year until one year, the council provided a lorry with tomatoes, and it became a very famous celebration,” Zanón said.

During the 1940s and ’50s, Franco ruled Spain with an iron grip, enforcing a rigid military dictatorship marked by deep political repression and division. It was a regime, Faber says, that punished his opponents while rewarding supporters, and carefully crafted a cultural narrative aligned with its authoritarian values. “The Franco regime imposed a strict calendar of holidays and celebrations,” Faber notes, “that aligned with the narrative of Spanish history that it sought to impose…of having been chosen by God to save the world.” 

With its rebellious spirit and lack of religious significance, La Tomatina didn’t fit the mold. The festival was officially banned in 1957. In the spirit of defiance in which the festival originated, locals continued to participate, even in the face of arrest. 

To protest the ban, townspeople staged an event that was both satirical and symbolic: a mock tomato funeral. “The whole town, including my dad, dressed in mourning,” Zanón told the BBC. “They were all wearing black. They had the hats that people used to wear when they attended a funeral. They made a coffin, and they must have been growing a huge tomato because they put it in the coffin. And then they marched to the council with a band playing funeral music.”

The theatrical protest worked. By 1959, the council lifted the ban, though not without introducing new rules—including a strict one-hour time limit on the tomato-throwing chaos. 

Over the decades, La Tomatina’s fame continued to grow. And in 2002, the Spanish secretary of the department of tourism named it an official Festivity of International Tourist Interest—cementing its place as one of the country’s most iconic and beloved celebrations.

Each August, thousands of tourists join the 9,000 residents of Buñol for the world’s biggest food fight. The event has grown so wildly popular that, in 2013, organizers required tickets and capped attendance at 20,000. Revelers now travel from all corners of the globe to attend the pulpy spectacle.

While the main event is limited to those 18 years and older, children ages 4 to 14 get their own tomato fight the Saturday before the famous battle. 

To ensure safety and minimize waste, only smushed tomatoes may be thrown—no bottles, hard objects or other foods allowed. As reported by the Valencian newspaper Las Provincias, the festival uses “super ripe” tomatoes, those no longer suitable for sale or canning.

The battle kicks off with a blast of water over the crowd and a scramble to climb a soaped-up pole to reach a ham leg perched on top—a slippery tradition known as the palo jabón. Once the ham falls, trucks loaded with tomatoes rumble into town, and it’s game on for one hour as the streets transform into a sea of red mayhem.