La Tomatina: a guide to Spain's messiest festival
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Street fairs can be unruly events. But when the whole purpose of the gathering is to create as much muck as possible, they move into a league of their own.
Food fights are surprisingly common festival activities the world over, and more often than not the weapon of choice is the humble tomato. Each year, on the last Wednesday in August, as many as 30,000 people descend on the small village of Buñol in Valencia to celebrate the Tomatina Festival . They've been coming here since 1944 to pummel each other with over-ripe tomatoes grown especially for the event. Sure, the scene is messy but at least it's relatively pain-free (and low-fat).
Not so in Piedmont, where partygoers are armed with welt-causing oranges. Legend has it the catalyst for the event was a local woman in the 12th century who, on her wedding day, refused to let the local duke sleep with her. She chopped off his head and (presumably) hurled it at him. Ouch.
For organizers faced with the unbridled enthusiasm of gathering hordes, even the gentlest festival can quickly turn messy. Take International Pillow Fight Day for example, a flash mob event now celebrated in more than a hundred cities all over the world, from Accra to Zürich. The pillow fights are so ferocious the pillows often burst on impact, sending plumes of stuffing sky high like a mushroom cloud. (Participants are encouraged to use hypoallergenic pillows.)
While a street full of stuffing, tomatoes or oranges might not be the most beautiful sight to behold, some messy festivals result in a painted wonderland. In Galaxidi, a small fishing village in Greece, revelers hurl multicolored flour to celebrate one of the holiest (and most ironically named) days of the year - Clean Monday. The coloring in the flour is so strong is stains the brickwork (homes and businesses tend to wrap their property in plastic, a la Christo and Jeanne-Claude).
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