El Perelló tomato festival

Celebrating Valencia's finest 🍅

Last weekend was the third anniversary of our arrival in Valencia and we marked the occasion at a festival celebrating the region’s most delectable tomatoes in the little beachside town of El Perelló.

El Perelló is a 30 minute drive south of Valencia through the Albufera national park. It’s a beautiful stretch of fragrant pine forests and rice fields that give way to roadsides lined with tomato plants under white-sheet canopies.

What makes Perelló tomatoes so special is how they are grown in sand at sea level, using water that contains high levels of mineral salts, yielding fruits with thin skins, juicy flesh, small seeds, and an intense, sweet flavour. Their colours range from yellowy-green through pink and light red.

The star is the Perelló, also called the Valencian. They also grow Rafs, Peras, Rosas, Redondas and Cherry Bonbons.

According to locals, Catalan filmmaker Bigas Luna shed an actual tear when he first tried a Perelló tomato in their town. The late director of Jamón, Jamón is said to have cancelled his lunch plans and insisted on going to look at the tomato plants instead.

While I’ve not sobbed over a tomato yet, I often get a kick of surprise at their remarkable flavour, especially compared to the watery, tasteless ones in my past. A sliced tomato with a drizzle of olive oil and a scatter of salt has become my go-to lunch. 

Some are so big (see massive 1.2 kg bruiser from our Ruzafa market below) that one will last you a couple of days. The more misshapen and irregular, the more intense the flavour, at least it seems that way to me. If you’re ever in Valencia, try the signature tomato dish in Anyora restaurant in Cabañyal: it’s called “chuleton de tomate” (tomato steak) and is a thing of beauty. 

The festival itself was relatively sedate (no tomato fights like La Tomatina), but like any Spanish street fest worth its salt, there was a mediaeval market street hawking joss sticks, crystals and curative herb infusions, a food street with local cheeses, hams, artisanal sobrasadas (had never tried one with honey it in before) and Valencian mussels, which are bang in season right now.

A third street was packed with shiny farm equipment, from slurry spreaders to a massive new tractor. And of course, there was a stage with an excitable emcee yelling at top volume ;-)