Thousands of people gathered in Buñol, eastern Spain, for La Tomatina, the annual tomato-throwing festival that turns the village streets red. The event remains an important local tradition and international tourist attraction, bringing visitors and revenue to the small town while requiring ticketing to manage crowd numbers.

Tonnes of over-ripe tomatoes were unloaded for around 20,000 participants, who threw them at one another for roughly an hour; their clothes and the streets were covered in pulp before a clean-up. Held on the last Wednesday of August, the festival originated from a 1945 children’s food fight, was banned under Franco in the 1950s, and grew internationally after media coverage and its depiction in a 2011 Bollywood film; about 40 per cent of recent participants have come from outside Spain.