Monday, November 19, 2007

A small writing on Spain


Spain is a Western European country. The country consists of Peninsular Spain which is located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, two archipelagos, one in each sea, and two autonomous cities in North Africa.
The Spanish mainland is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the south and east, by the Cantabric Sea that includes the Bay of Biscay to the north, and by the Atlantic Ocean and Portugal to the west. Spanish territory also includes the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands off the African coast. It shares land borders with Portugal, France, Andorra, the British colony of Gibraltar, and Morocco. It is the largest of the three sovereign states that make up the Iberian Peninsula the others being Portugal and Andorra. With an area of 504,030 km², Spain is the second largest country in Western Europe (behind France).
Spain is a constitutional monarchy organised as a parliamentary democracy, and has been a member of the European Union since 1986. It is a developed country with the ninth largest economy in the world and fifth largest in the EU, based on nominal GDP.
Culture in Spain: La Tomatina Tomato Fight
Surely the worlds' biggest food-fight: every year around 30,00 people descend on the Spanish town of Bunol (in the Valencia region of Spain) to throw more than 240,000 pounds of tomatoes at each other.
The festival is started with a ham-on-a-stick contest where competitors raced up a pole to retrieve a smoked leg of ham. When the ham is cut down, people put on eye protection and cry for tomatoes as trucks dump the squishy produce onto the village streets. They then proceed to pelt each other with them until all have been used up.
The festival on the last Wednesday of August is called 'the Tomatina' and is basically a town-wide tomato fight. It is thought the tradition began in 1945 when a fight erupted among two young members of a carnival crowd. A vegetable stall was nearby in the town square and every started throwing tomatoes at each other. Exactly one year later, young people met at the square, but this time with their own tomatoes. Another food-fight started but was broken up by police.
In the following years this practice was banned by the authorities, but due to popular demand was given official recognition in 1959. This was only to occur if participants would respect the start and the end of tomato-throwing being announced with a banger.

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