Thousands of people descended on the Spanish town of Bunol on Wednesday to take part in the Tomatina festival. The annual food fight draws visitors from around the world.

They pelt each other with ripe fruit until they become soaked through with tomato juice and covered in pulp, using more than 200,000 pounds of tomatoes. Some of those involved in this messy festival got a stinging reminder that tomatoes are acidic, and could be seen rubbing their eyes after getting a soggy missile to the face. When the tomato supply runs out, the messy throng jumps into a nearby river en masse.

La Tomatina is rumoured to have started in the 1940s when a group of young friends began throwing their lunch at each other one day, near a vegetable stand on a town square. Before long, it turned into an annual tradition

Pelt: to attack someone by throwing a lot of things at them

en masse: (from French) all together, and usually in large numbers

La Tomatina: a food fight festival held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region in Spain.