Why these two summer-time Spanish festivals are worthy of your bucket list

By Mal Chenu

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises informed the anglosphere about Encierro - aka the Running of the Bulls - in Pamplona, Spain:

"...from the crowd of youths came a yell: "Hah! Hah! . . . Toro!" The bulls lowered their heads, charged the crowd. The crowd took to its heels, the bulls stampeding in pursuit."

The major fixture of the annual Festival de San Fermin, Encierro has been a crazy way for senores to impress senoritas for centuries. And if you need a new macho move to impress your senorita - and she's bored with watching you skydive naked and wrestle crocodiles - this is the way to go.

(And before some readers lose their stereotypical minds, yes, women run too. Far fewer than men because, you know, the stupid, but run they do.)

Just donning the uniform and joining the cheering throng will make her/him/pronoun swoon. All white with a red sash and scarf (and bloody good running shoes), Encierro looks - and sounds - like a Sydney Swans home game.

When the rocket is fired at 8am and the bulls are released, the question of "fight or flight" is unambiguously answered in the latter, and for the next 850-metre, six 700-kilogram Toro Bravos chase a couple of thousand daring loonies through the narrow streets.

If you're not keen on running, due to a dodgy hamstring or an IQ above 80, you can reserve a balcony for between about $200 and $800, depending on the view and height. "Dead Man's Curve" is the most coveted spot, and is named sufficiently well for you to know the balcony is where you should get your thrills.

But look, tomatoes can be pretty thrilling too. In a parallel universe, Hemingway, the wartime ambulance driver, giant marlin wrangler and fighter of Franco's fascists, might have turned his tight prose to La Tomatina, in a piece entitled Bruschetta in the Afternoon:

"The young man raised his tomato. Its taut red skin glistened in the sunshine. He cried "pomodoro!" and plunged into battle. But before he could hurl his Heirloom, he was caught on the chin by an under-ripe Roma. Juice and seeds dripped down his chin like drooled paella. It left a small mark."

Confronting, disturbing stuff.

But "Papa" did not go to La Tomatina. He took to the cobblestone streets of Pamplona and dashed ahead of bellicose, snorting, bovine battering rams.

Festival de San Fermin also features the gigantes y cabezudos (giants and big-heads) parade of huge grotesque figures made in 1860, as well as religious processions, concerts, folk dancing, fireworks displays and bullfights, fuelled by traditional foods and tempranillo.

Don't be cowed into attending lesser festivals, such La Tomatina. Unlike a tomato, which clocks in at 94 per cent, Amy's argument doesn't hold water.

By Amy Cooper

You bet I'm going to declare Mal full of bull this week. And so will you if trampling, goring and brutality don't happen to be on your happy holiday bingo card. Don't get me wrong, even we vegetarians enjoy some mindless violence. We just unleash ours on plant-based foods instead. So please pass on Pamplona and come with me to La Tomatina, the vegan alternative to San Fermin, as harmless as bull running is horrid.

Unless you're a tomato, of course. Every August 28, more than 150,000 kilograms of the fruit (yes, it is a fruit but masquerades as a vegetable, a culinary crime I reckon fully justifies its mass slaughter) are hurled and splattered in the little Spanish town of Buol in a scarlet carnage resembling a mass re-enactment of that famous scene in Carrie. The annual tomato-flinging fest is so popular it once drew up to 50,000 people from around the globe and now has numbers capped at a ticketed 20,000.

What's the appeal? I could discuss the cultural significance of the world's biggest food fight but, honestly, there is none. Tomatina has no religious or spiritual meaning. It's just good fun. Most locals say the fiesta began accidentally in 1945, when disgruntled spectators pelted a "giants and bigheads" parade with tomatoes. This explosive precursor to the Google review took over as the festival's main entertainment.

Nothing about Tomatina makes much sense. Proceedings can only begin once someone retrieves a ham from atop a two-storey greased pole (offering inclusivity for carnivores), but this usually proves so impossible that the starter water cannons fire regardless, everyone grabs truckloads of pre-ripened tomatoes and squishes and hurls them at each other for one hour. Then you're hosed down for a massive after-party.

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If you're struggling to justify a flight to Spain just for a 60-minute tomato toss, there's plenty more to ketchup on in the region once you've had your fling. Buel's surrounding Valencia province, in Spain's south-east, has a balmy Mediterranean coastline with seaside restaurants serving paella, Valencia's delicious invention and nobler sacrifice for tomatoes.

Valencia the city was awarded European Green Capital 2024 for its outdoors attractions, including Albufera Natural Park, a stunning lagoon teeming with birdlife. The city's ancient quarter, Barrio del Carmen, is a cobbled trove of medieval treasures including 11th-century Valencia Cathedral, home of the actual Holy Grail, and Central Market, a temple of fresh produce with a far more reverent attitude to fruit.

While Mal's sharing his souvenir bruises and shock and bull stories in the bloody Basque, I'll be kicking back in a cocktail bar on Valencia's exclusive Calle de Coln, glowing with vitamin C and good vibes - because when life gives you tomatoes, you drink Bloody Marys.