Fantastic Festivals – Big numbers

Fantastic festivals
There are a lot of fantastic festivals around the world. On the last Wednesday in August, 30,000 people travel to Bunol, in Spain, for La Tomatina. At this festival people throw tomatoes at each other – 125,000 kilos of them! At around noon 12 trucks take the tomatoes into the centre of the town, Plaza del Pueblo. The tomatoes come from Extremadura, where they are not so expensive. The fight starts when the first person throws a tomato. It ends after one hour and the cleaning begins. Fire trucks spray 400,000 litres of water down the street to wash away all the tomato sauce.
For three days every July 150,000 people go to the town of Gilroy, in California, for the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Here you can eat garlic bread, garlic chicken, garlic chocolate and garlic ice cream! You can enjoy live music and entertainment, art and craft market and programmes for all the family. They even have a cooking competition that 150 people can enter, and they all use a lot of garlic in their dishes!
Of course not all festivals are about food. The UK’s favourite music festival is the Glastonbury Festival. It is a five day party in Pilton every June. Only 1,500 people were at the first festival in 1970, but in 2024 there were 215,500 people there. The most famous pop and rock artists play at the festival but you can enjoy dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts, too.
And for a really big festival, there’s the amazing Kumbh Mela in India. There’s only one Kumbh Mela every 12 years. It’s a Hindu festival and in January-February 2025 it went on for 45 days and 660,000,000 people were there. They even built a temporary city for the people at the festival!