BUNOL, Spain (AP) -- Ingredients: 30,000 people, 132 tons of ripe, juicy plum tomatoes.

Mix them together in Bunol's central square and you get La Tomatina. Or, in a loose translation: Food Fight!

Probably the biggest food fight ever, in fact. On Wednesday, the highlight of a weeklong annual holiday celebrating Bunol's patron saint turned this small Spanish town into a red sea of seeds and slime.

At the stroke of noon, a bottle-rocket was fired into the sky and six construction trucks began edging their way into the town square, dumping their cargo. Nine hundred and twenty-four thousand is a lot of tomatoes, no matter how you spell it.

The crowd, mostly male teens and 20-somethings -- many of them foreigners -- had worked themselves up to fever pitch, supercharged on alcohol and adrenalin.

The streets were soon shin-deep in tomatoes, and the ripe and watery fruit splattered on heads and backs as the crowd turned them into projectiles.

"Of course it's juvenile," said Syber Bergado, of San Jose, Calif. "But it's great! It's a chance to be yourself."

"This is fantastic!" screamed Stacey Rawlings, an Australian caught in the cross fire between two impromptu armies in the Plaza del Pueblo and covered with goo.

When there were no whole tomatoes left, hands grabbed at mushy chunks floating in the soup below and the battle sent up clouds of red spray.

After an hour, it was all over. The citizens of Bunol, 190 miles southeast of Madrid, took down the plastic sheeting covering their homes and several came out with hoses to rinse the throwers, as they do every year.

A record 30,000 people took part in the annual ritual this year, said town councilwoman Maribel Ferrer.

The origin of La Tomatina is a subject of debate.

Some say Bunol rejected bullfights as cruel in 1932, and was hungry for a festival to replace them.

Others say it started with a food fight among a bunch of boys in the Plaza del Pueblo in the 1940s.

Another legend says it began as a protest against the tyranny of order and discipline imposed by dictator Gen. Francisco Franco.

Joaquin Ortiz Lambies, 76, says it was none of the above.

"I was young, very young. Two grown-ups came with baskets of tomatoes from the fields and they just started throwing them," said Lambies, a paper-factory worker. "Why? Well, just because."