The mystery of the Tomatina festival doppelgänger

Madrid photographer Eva Casado has been searching for her mystery doppelganger for five years now. That other woman could be her twin sister or just another young woman with a very similar appearance. But what’s certain is that the girl who appeared in the photograph taken in 2010 alongside an article about the Tomatina tomato throwing festival in Buñol, a town in the Mediterranean region of Valencia, is almost identical to Casado.

Eva Casado first heard about the photo by chance after her cousin spotted it in a magazine article about the hugely popular tomato throwing festival while he was on an airplane, traveling from Mexico to Spain.

“How secretive of her. She went to Tomatina and didn’t tell us anything,” thought her cousin when he saw the picture. But the girl in the image was not Eva Casado.

The resemblance gave her chills and Eva Casado has not stopped looking for her mystery twin

“When he told me I thought he was crazy because I had never gone there and there’s no way the resemblance would be that uncanny… until I saw the photo that looked like an expert-level version of one of those find the seven differences games,” she wrote on Facebook in a letter addressed to her double that she’s trying to find.

More than 70,000 people have already shared the note.

Casado then decided to take a photo with similar lighting and with herself in the same position as the mystery girl from Tomatina to really demonstrate the similarities between them. “I don’t know if it was the lighting, or the spots of tomato on her face, but the resemblance gave me chills,” says Eva, who has not stopped looking for the girl.

She wants to find out if the resemblance is simply genetic chance or if the other woman is her twin sister. “I discovered that there had been robberies of babies in the hospital where I was born,” she continues. “My mother is a twin, which also disturbs me; when I asked her [about the Tomatina coincidence], she told me she was not asleep during childbirth and that she though it was strange, but when I told her about the robberies at the hospital I saw a look in her eyes that chilled me.”

Once again, this year Casado will continue her search. “To the girl from Tomatina, if you are reading this and have finally seen the photo taken by Camilo Olarte, I want you to know that my only objective is to solve the puzzle that’s been with me since the day I discovered it.”

English version by Debora Almeida.