
Hospes Palau de la Mar
Valencia, Spain
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Valencia, Spain
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Famously, Valencia enjoys more than 300 cloudless days a year (part of the reason its oranges are so tasty), only seeing remotely serious rainfall infrequently in autumn and spring. July and August are usually exceedingly hot and humid, leading to a mass exodus of locals from the city and the closure of a fair few restaurants and shops. The fringes of summer – May and June and September – can be the most pleasant periods to visit, although Valencia makes a good year-round destination.
It’s not an architectural marvel, nor a museum of historical treasures, but the folk festival of La Tomatina, in the small Valencian town of Buñol, is one of the cultural highlights of modern Spain. Well, we say ‘folk festival’; it’s more a mass food fight – and a marvellous example of how humanity can latch on to something ridiculous and turn it into tradition. They story starts with a scuffle at a summer parade in 1945 when rambunctious youngsters went ballistic (literally) with a vegetable stall in the market, until the police intervened. They returned the next year to commemorate the anniversary, and again the next. More people joined in each passing year. Eventually, the city authorities gave up trying to stop them and instead started giving them tomatoes. Today, on the last Wednesday in August, around 40,000 eager fruit-flingers flock to the town square at 9am to pelt each other with 125,000kg of tomatoes, over the course of an hour, until the streets run red with juice. It is all both violently joyful and profoundly silly, and although the actual event only lasts an hour, the spirit of revelry fills most of the week. Accommodation’s in short supply in Buñol, but if you’re joining in the madness, Hospes Palau de la Mar in Valencia is an hour away. (Photo credit: MikeJamieson(1950) / Foter / CC BY-SA)