Thousands of revellers have packed into the narrow streets of Buñol in eastern Spain for La Tomatina, the town’s annual tomato-throwing festival that has become one of the country’s most distinctive summer attractions.

For about an hour on Wednesday, trucks unloaded up to 165 tonnes of overripe tomatoes into the crowd as festival-goers, many in white T-shirts, hurled the fruit at each other to a soundtrack of blasting pop music.

Authorities covered buildings with tarps before the melee and deployed police, who at one point appeared to use pepper spray to disperse part of the crowd before the festivities quickly resumed.

More than 20,000 people were expected to attend, with Spanish media reporting that about 40 percent of participants in recent years are international tourists, including a growing number from India following the 2011 Bollywood film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

La Tomatina, held on the last Wednesday of August, began with a local food fight in 1945 and survived a ban under Francisco Franco before television turned it into a global spectacle.