During the week leading up to the world famous tomato war, parades, fireworks, music, dancing and the paella cook-off contest draw visitors to Buñol for the annual fiesta. When the day of the great battle dawns, local shopkeepers diligently cover their shopfronts with sheets of plastic and twenty thousand local folk and tourists take to the streets, as trucks loaded with around 125,000 kilos of ripe ammo roll into the Plaza del Pueblo. Between 11am and 1pm, the streets are awash with juice, pavements are spattered with pulp and the participants transformed into walking, talking Bloody Marys.