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Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.
I find this rather hard to believe. Particularly in the south of Spain by 1:00 p.m it’s unbearably hot, everyone wants to get everything done in the morning so they don’t have to be trying to do it during the height of the days heat.
Because it is simply not true
I guess it is supposed to be a joke, or meme. But it is pretty unfunny. It is just stupid.
One Summer we went to Spain before the DST issue got solved and because after arriving in Madrid it was 43° C we told ourselves “we’ll get up earlier and have a stroll around the city at 6am so it’s fresh” - it was DARK for hours 😂
Me and friends were joking about it was the country for those vampire movies where the night never ends
On the other side, those evenings with still a bit of sun at 10pm were awesome
Spain is quite far in the west of a too big timzone. In the summertime the solar noon in Madrid should be around 2:15 pm.
We spent some time in Italy in the summer about fifteen years ago, and you genuinely had to be careful which cities you visited at which times because entire cities would go on vacation at the same time. We went to Bologna at the wrong time apparently because almost everything was closed except for a few things around the train station. While it was kind of nice having the place to ourselves and wandering the parks, it also sucked to have to eat convenience store food. Coming from a place where almost everything is open year round, 24 hours a day, it was wild.
We spent about 7 or 8 years wintering in southern Spain. Malaga, Torremolinos, Nerja, Almunecar and everywhere in between.
It took us about three years to figure out the local eating schedule.
Breakfast is about 8-9am and anything with a lot of food is usually a tourist meal. The Spanish live on air, coffee and cigarettes… if they’re feeling hungry in the morning, they’ll have a pastry.
Restaurants will seldom stay open beyond noon and won’t open until six. If you’re hungry at 3 or 4 pm? It’s better to starve.
Any restaurant that opens at 6 is a tourist place that sells a lot of basic fast food stuff.
The good local restaurants start opening at 8 pm and local families start arriving to eat at about 9 pm. The entire family, three or four generations of them will take up entire tables and sit around eating drinking and talking until about 10-11 and a few until about midnight.
They eat solidly about one good meal a day and snack the rest of the time with plenty of coffee, pastries or cookies but never to excess.
It’s why you will seldom find an overweight Spanish person of any age. They eat little and constantly move all day.
I miss that place and wish we were there right now.
I agree with your timings, but Spain has an obesity rate of over 20%, so I would say seldom is a serious underestimation.
Also, Spain is not a mystical domain filled with elves, of course people are lazy, over-eat, and snack in excess. They are human after all.
The Spain we saw was about 25 years ago. We saw the old Spain that was just transitioning to the Euro. Our first visits, we were actually dealing with Pesetas which made it easy at the time because a Peseta was equivalent very close to the Canadian penny. 100 Pesetas was $1 CAD.
Malaga still had a lot of old world charm as it hadn’t really changed in 30 years and looked like something from the past. The last time we saw it was about 8 years ago and now it looks like an American Disneyland … almost like the Spanish pavilion for a world fair or something.
And that old culture is what I remember. People were still living with little and the generation at the time remembered what it was like to be poor and their parents only ever knew life as being poor or living with little. Plus the country is hot like the desert in the summer … so all of it was conducive to everyone eating little because they didn’t have that much wealth and the weather made it uncomfortable to want to eat too much.
I’m sure it’s changed over the years but not by much.
Also, Spain is not a mystical domain filled with elves
Eh, Disneyland, walkable European city – same difference!
Spaniard here.
School starts at 9. Work can vary, but 8-9 is common. Typical breakfast is coffee and a pastry, but some people will have something savory instead. Not the most common, though.
Lunch is at 2pm. Restaurants usually take customers from 1 to 3.30 pm. If you have lunch at home, a proper meal is in order, but lately, less and less people can do this. So snacking for lunch during work days is becoming more common, sadly.
Dinner is at 9pm but there is a tendency to move this earlier, particularly when eating at home on work days. Restaurants take customers from 8 to 10pm, and a dinner out can last until past midnight.
What’s interesting is that Spain’s colony Mexico has similar meal times, but the big meal is at about 3pm, and the evening meal is just a snack that many people will skip.
Fun fact, Spain’s unusual schedule is partially due to timezones! The country itself is literally an hour late, and is kinda stuck in either an idyllic summer lifestyle or a vicious labor cycle, depending on how you look at it.
Glance at a map and you’ll realise that Spain – sitting, as it does, along the same longitude as the UK, Portugal and Morocco – should be in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). But Spain goes by Central European Time (CET), putting it in sync with the Serbian capital Belgrade, more than 2,500km east of Madrid.
Being 60 minutes behind the correct time zone means the sun rises later and sets later, bestowing Spain with gloriously long summer evenings and 10pm sunsets.
But for many Spaniards, living in the wrong time zone has resulted in sleep deprivation and decreased productivity. The typical Spanish work day begins at 9am; after a two-hour lunch break between 2 and 4pm, employees return to work, ending their day around 8pm. The later working hours force Spaniards to save their social lives for the late hours. Prime-time television doesn’t start until 10:30pm.
Spaniards have traditionally coped with their late nights by taking a mid-morning coffee break and a two-hour lunch break, giving them the opportunity to enjoy one of the country’s most famous traditions: the siesta.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170504-the-strange-reason-spaniards-eat-late
Basically, they still take breaks (that have pre-timezone cultural roots) in large part because they start too early and because they work and eat and sleep late… but they work and eat and sleep late because they start too early and take long breaks and the sun sets late… so they get less sleep and need more breaks and naps to get through the long day…
Fun fact. It’s because of Nazis.
National Socialists or just fascists in general?
Nazis for Spain is bit of a joke. Franco wanted to suck up to Hitler who put Belgium, Netherlands, and France on German time when he conquered them.
Close enough, then. Not just fascism, Nazis. Even if the Nazis weren’t directly in power, it sounds like they are in the causal chain for the timezone being so much different from solar time. Thanks for the clarification / confirmation.
TBF, they’re using central european time (which is centered on the border between Germany and Poland), even though they’re at the western end of their own timezone (with several parts being over the border to the next one) if our timezones adhered strictly to longitude. If you subtract 1.5 hours from all Spanish times, they’re considerably less weird.
Which funnily means the Spaniards tend to have dinner at the same time as the Portuguese, who use GMT and tend to dine at 8 PM.
Does school and work also start later?
School definitely does, and work does as well AFAIK. I doubt many people would be having dinner at 23:00 if most of them needed to be at work or school at 8:00.
… you should eat two hours before sleep. You need 8 hours of sleep. You need time to get to and ready in the morning to get to work. This is not enough time (though I do realize that Spanish dinners are smaller)
Lies!
The last point does not hold. Spanish people I know eat dinner at 11 PM and breakfast at 7 AM. And they live outside of Spain, the timezone issue does not apply here. Idk when they sleep (Siesta? Siesta in Sweden/Germany?) Please explain.
Siesta would definitely make sense in Germany. It’s not as hot as Spain, but it makes up for it by being very unprepared for summer in terms of architecture and the presence of air conditioners, it’s quite humid and most cities are far away from the sea. Finding an employer who lets you do it is another matter though …
Siestas are the one thing I miss back in the time I worked in a country that observed them. Nothing better than having a cup of coffee after lunch, taking a quick nap after, and waking up just in time for the caffeine to kick in. If I do that at my work now, I’sd probably be fired for sleeping on the job.
Plot twist: they’re a bus driver.
”breakfast” spots OPEN at 1 pm
I have finally found my people. I must go there.
Yeah, that is not true.
Restaurants usually open at 20 or 20:30, not 21.
Spain in also in the wrong time zone. Because of Nazis.
