About 40,000 young people from all over the world on Wednesday in the eastern Spanish town of Buñol participated in a gigantic food fight with ripe tomatoes, the popular “Tomatina” festival, which this year was transformed into an act of collective catharsis whereby people could - for a while, anyway - forget the effects of the country’s serious economic crisis.

The yearly hour-long tomato war was begun 67 years ago as a game by local youths but it has steadily been gaining greater attention worldwide.