La Tomatina

So, how did a tradition as strange as an annual mass tomato fight come about? The story goes that in 1944, during a traditional parade of gigantes y cabezudos (giants and big heads), a gang of men held a brawl using produce from a nearby vegetable stand as weapons. The police intervened and forced them to pay for the damage they caused, but the fight was repeated the following year with participants bringing tomatoes from home. The local council officially sanctioned the fight in the 1950s and, apart from a few cancellations, it has been an annual Bunol tradition ever since.