participate in the Tomato Fight in Bunol, Spain

Have a flight that week from Valencia, so the opportunity just serendipitously fell into my lap. But shall keep everyone’s tips in mind. Thanks for the great info :)

Get in early the day b4 if you want a park/somwhere to sleep. Try the carpark at the train st. Make sure you buy food & piss b4 you get there, it saves time.

DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT take anything valuable to the actual fight, it will be lost, stolen or broken.

Also, be aware of some of the local lads who think it’s cool to steal your party bottle & throw it everywhere or steal/rip off your fave t-shirt.

It’s crowded and messey, if you can’t handle a mosh pit wiyh tomatos & shirts been thown at you get in xtra early on higher ground, perhaps one of the little squares.

Enjoy urselves, it’s a very special time…...

La Tomatina 2007, i was there, i thru, i received tomatos…..

I will be there this year, 29th Aug. If anybody wants to meet up for a Bloody Mary.

The sucata run I want to do finsihes in portugal 2 days before the tomato fight, so I would like to road trip back across spain to Bunol. But….. I’ve got to try and get the girlfriend to come first.

ending with a cruise in barcelona then going down to Bunol. looking for a place in valencia to stay. anyone else out there doing similiar????

Well that has totally put me off it now!!! I think ill still do it but im not too sure about taking my girlfreind.

I drove with two of my friends from school to Buñol to go to the Tomatina. Despite waking up at 5 AM to start the drive after only 3 hours of sleep, it was an amazing amount of fun. Particularly entertaining was the attempts to get the leg of ham down from the top of a tall greased pole. Now, this seems hard enough, but when you consider that nearly all of the people attempting to climb the pole are the selfish idiot frat boy types, any slight progress that is made is immediately ruined by more people trying to climb the small base than are in the base, and the whole pile collapsing. Imagine the most selfish people in the world doing something that any moron could tell would require a large amount of teamwork and you have the basic idea. Then add large amounts of alcohol to tons of tourists from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and a few from America and you get Spaniards trying to “defend their honor” and prevent the few people who are actually likely to get the ham down form succeeding. It took hours and was quite funny.

The actual tomato fight was a ton of fun too, although a bit more scary because people were pushing everywhere and there was tons of disgusting water filling the streets into which people were falling and nearly getting trampled, and five giant trucks rumbling through the streets packed with people (there are organizers guarding the front of the truck and physically forcing the crowds away from the bumper and wheels) and it’s pretty ridiculous. However, the truly scary part is after the second canon goes off announcing the end of the fight and everyone pushed hard towards the few exit areas that were used to fill the area over the course of a few hours and now are being emptied in 15 of 20 minutes. At this point the drunk rowdy Spaniards make an even better name for themselves by ripping the shirts off anyone who dares to still wear one, sometimes including girls (all of whom are smart enough to wear bras or bathing suits under them), and harassing anyone of Asian looking origin as “tomatina” sort of kind of rhymes with “toma china” if you’re obnoxious, and this results in the horrific scene that I witnessed of about 12-15 large drunk Spanish young men trying to rip the clothes off and harass in any way possible a very small Asian girl.

Overall, the tomatina was an incredibly poorly organized early morning booze fest (everyone starts drinking heavily at about 8 AM) that needs police and guardia civil on all the balconies with high powered water hoses to break up fights, harassment, and other things that shouldn’t be seen in a society as generally well mannered as the Spanish. Nevertheless, it was an enormous amount of fun for almost all involved, excepting the poor few people who became targets for more than a severe pounding with tomatoes (which is inescapable, by the way, everyone gets hit hard in the face and all over the upper body at least a few dozen times), and I would reccomend it to anyone who is interested in going with the possible exception of groups of asian girls, although anyone who goes should know exactly what they are getting themselves into and be well prepared.

Lest you think that I have some bias against Spaniards as might be seen in this post, I noted it mostly as a disappointment in the actions and behavior of the people present, not the people of Spain in general, whom I absolutely love. This type of event, along with the running of the bulls in Pamplona tends to attract a certain type of largely-male crowd that tends to want to be a hero, get attention, act like a total jerk, get unreasonably drunk, and generally enjoy themselves at the expense of others, and this is true of any nationality, although by no means was everyone there like this, there are many wonderful people there also.

Now, since I’ve woken up at 5 AM after three hours of sleep, skipped four classes, driven 700 km, attended one class and a welcome barbeque for the semester and generally exhausted myself, I’m going to bed.

I’ll try to post the pictures I took soon, althoguh I used a waterproof disposable camera instead of a digital because it would have gotten ruined, so it may take a while to get it developed.

wasn’t there an early episode of roadrules where they went to the tomato fight? i remember seeing it awhile back.

Is anyone going this year? I’m wondering beacuse it is next week and I’m still deciding whether I should go or not, the problem is that not only will the three people that I was planning to go with be leaving just beforehand, but I’ll be back in class next week and I’d have to skip the third day of classes to drive down.
Anyone?