Tomatina will always be trying to get clean afterwards

Soon the big day arrived, and I turned up at the Ibis hotel in Valencia to meet my tour group. The first thing we did was visit a wine and water festival in a town nearby and I was really surprised by what an amazing night I had. Our tour leaders told us the cultural, family driven nature of this event, and we spent time enjoying a lovely atmosphere in the town centre with the locals. Then after a firework display, we headed to the local bull ring where there were live bands and much singing and dancing until the early hours. This was an authentically Spanish experience, and a real bonus considering I really only was here for the tomato fight.

The following day was amazing fun! From 9am we were in Bunol waiting for La Tomatina to start. I watched people trying to climb to the top of a greasy pole to get a ham which was attached to the top, and then enjoyed they total mayhem of the tomato fight. My lasting memory of La Tomatina will always be trying to get clean afterwards. Never in my life before have I found it acceptable to wash in a river, and then walk around town asking locals to hose me down with a garden water hose. And I guess in a nutshell that’s why these festivals are so popular. You find yourself doing things you would never normally do, you drop your guard, and suddenly you enjoy the camaraderie of washing yourself in a river with hundreds of other people all trying to get tomato off their bodies. You also experience a different culture and the sunshine defiantly helps!


Also Pillow Tours were amazing, well organised and gave great information about how to make the most of the events. I strongly recommend going with a group, as I made loads of friends and sharing an experience like La Tomatina with other people makes it even more fun. All in all I had a fantastic experience, and was finally able to join in with conversations about European festivals, and will even be booking a tour to Oktoberfest later in the year.

For further details about running with the bulls, Ladies Day Ascot
and Pamplona please visit the website.

One of these famous festivals to see what all the fuss

As a young Australian living in London, I hear a lot about Europe’s amazing summer festivals. Almost every week during the summer my friends are heading off on tours like Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls or Oktoberfest for the Munich Beer Festival. It seems these festivals have become a right of passage for young backpackers living in London, with people treating you like a social outcast if you have not visited at least one of these “must do” events.

With this in mind, I decided to try one of these famous festivals to see what all the fuss was about. I did not fancy running down a narrow street being chased by six or seven 1 tonne bulls at Pamplona , and I am more of a wine girl so drinking litre stein’s of beer at Oktoberfest also did not really appeal. That left the last of the “big three events”, the world’s largest food fight called La Tomatina in Spain. I liked this idea a lot, an organised food fight in sunny Spain, and I even like tomatoes so it seemed the best option for me. After doing some research I decided to book a tour with Pillow Adventure Travel Company, who also included a trip to a local wine and water festival the night before La Tomatina.


Once the tour and my flight was booked, I decided to do a little research on the history of La Tomatina, and quickly realised there was no history. It seemed the event started around the 1940’s but nobody really knew why. Some stories claim locals threw tomatoes at an unpopular politician during a speech. Other accounts claim people threw tomatoes at a bad musician during a performance, and a truck carrying tomatoes was involved in an accident and its load was spilt over the road. The event really started to get popular in the 1980s, and now attracts up to 40,000 people a year to a tiny town called Bunol, which normally has a population of 9,000 people.


For further details about running with the bulls and Ladies Day Ascot
Please visit the website.