Buñol

Where it sits. Buñol is a town of roughly nine thousand people about thirty-eight kilometres inland from Valencia, in the comarca of Hoya de Buñol, where the coastal plain gives out and the ground begins to climb towards the Iberian System. The Buñol river has cut a gorge through soft limestone below the old centre, and the town is built on the shelf above it, with the castle occupying the promontory at the point where the ravine turns. The setting is dry Mediterranean interior rather than coast: pine, carob and almond on the slopes, a landscape of pale rock and irrigation channels, and summer temperatures that regularly pass thirty-five degrees. For eleven months and three weeks of the year almost nobody outside the province thinks about the place at all.

The castle and the old town. The Castillo de Buñol is one of the best preserved medieval fortresses in the Valencian Community and one of the strangest, because people live inside it. Built in its present form in the thirteenth century, in the period when Valencian territory passed from Muslim to Aragonese control, it consists of two walled enclosures on the rock spur, and over the centuries the lower enclosure filled up with ordinary houses, a square and the parish church of San Pedro, so that the castle is simply a neighbourhood with battlements. The keep, a square tower with a vaulted hall, and the fourteenth-century Gothic chapel survive, and part of the complex houses a small archaeological and ethnological museum. Below the walls, the town's modern economy is far less picturesque: a large cement works has operated in the valley for a century and its quarry cuts the hillside opposite.

La Tomatina. On the last Wednesday of August, Buñol stages the largest food fight on earth. The origin story is prosaic: in 1945 a scuffle broke out during a parade of giants and big-heads in the Plaza del Pueblo, someone reached into a greengrocer's display, and the following year the participants came back deliberately. The authorities banned it repeatedly through the 1950s, residents kept reviving it, and it was finally legalised in 1957 and declared a festival of international tourist interest in 2002. The mechanics are fixed. A ham is fastened to the top of a greased pole in the square, and the fight begins when someone reaches it or, more usually, when the organisers lose patience and fire the water cannon. Six lorries then move down the narrow Calle del Cid tipping well over a hundred tonnes of overripe plum tomatoes, grown for the purpose in Extremadura, and for exactly one hour several thousand people throw them at each other. A second cannon ends it, fire hoses wash the streets, and the acid in the pulp leaves the paving cleaner than it was. Since 2013 the event has been ticketed and capped at around twenty thousand participants, after uncontrolled years pushed the crowd past forty thousand in a town built for a fraction of that.

On screen. Buñol's international profile owes an enormous amount to a single Hindi film. Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) follows three friends on a road trip through Spain, each choosing one adventure the others cannot refuse, and the tomato fight is the film's third and final set piece, filmed at the real festival and cut to the song Ik Junoon, in which the cast are drenched in red pulp in the Calle del Cid. The sequence gave the festival a vast new audience across South Asia, and Indian participation in La Tomatina, negligible before 2011, has been substantial ever since. The film also shot in Barcelona, on the Costa Brava, in Seville and at the San Fermín bull run in Pamplona, and it is credited across the Spanish tourism industry with reshaping the Indian market's picture of the country.

The rest of the year. Outside the festival, Buñol is a quiet provincial town with two things worth the trip. The Parque Fluvial follows the river through the gorge below the castle, past mill races, small weirs and pools where people swim in July. Four kilometres out of town, the Cueva Turche is a horseshoe of rock about sixty metres high with a seasonal waterfall dropping into a green pool, reached by a short marked walk and busy with local families on summer weekends. Buñol also has an unusual musical culture: two large amateur wind bands, the Artística and the Unión Musical, have competed against one another for more than a century and both perform at a serious standard.

Getting there and timing. Cercanías trains on the Valencia to Utiel line reach Buñol in about fifty minutes from Valencia Nord, and buses run from the city; on Tomatina day extra services operate and the town closes to traffic. Anyone attending the fight should arrive with clothes to throw away, goggles, and no expectation of finding accommodation locally, since most participants travel out from Valencia the same day. For everything else, spring and early autumn are far more comfortable than the fierce inland summer.