Revellers filled Pamplona with the acidic smell of the local sparkling wine today as a series of powerful firecrackers launched Spain's best known festival, the running of the bulls.
Hundreds of thousands of locals and foreign visitors packed the central square of this northern Spanish city where they sprayed each other with cheap sparkling wine and shaving foam and smeared each other in flour and mustard.
“Everything is allowed here,” said Javier Castillo, 25, from Santo Domingo, Ecuador. “They throw champagne at you, wine, sangria and no one minds.“
Today's party kicks off the San Fermin festival, made famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1920s novel The Sun also Rises.
Each morning over a week in July, six bulls are set loose on a 825-metre (2,700-foot) course through Pamplona 's cobbled streets where thrill seekers run with the half-tonne animals to the bull ring.
Locals and tourists all dress in the traditional white of the centuries-old fiesta with red neckerchiefs and waistbands but after the champagne crossfire, most outfits were spattered pink or yellow and some encrusted with flour.
Amid the chaos, smartly dressed musicians in traditional bands marched through the streets.
Foreign nationals have added a new tradition to the festival, throwing themselves off a fountain into the arms of those below. This year dozens of young men and women dived, arms outstretched, into the drunken crowd.
“This is the wildest thing I've ever done,” Mark Ritchie, from Coffs Harbour, Australia, said as a compatriot went to throw herself into the crowd.
The ground of the main square was dyed yellow with mustard, and corks, the odd shoe and broken bottles piled up in the gutter. Some party-goers avoided glass with traditional Spanish wine skins slung across their shoulders.
Locals poured buckets of water on to dirty revellers below, who begged for more showers.
Eighty people ended up in the hands of the Red Cross, with four taken to hospital, a spokesman said. Police estimated there were hundreds of thousands in the streets of this usually conservative city.