Aha: this is why they have dinner so late in Spain
Sitting down at the table around eleven o’clock in the evening; I often associate that with being on vacation. Spain is one of my favorite countries, after all, and there even eleven o’clock is still considered quite reasonable. I often wondered how they manage it there. I’m on vacation, so I don’t necessarily have to do anything the next morning. But how do the locals manage, when they simply have to work the next morning? And above all: why do they actually do it?
I always thought it had to do with the heat; it only cools down a little later in the evening, and then it’s nice to go out for dinner. Before that, it’s simply too hot. Seemed perfectly logical to me. But it was completely wrong.
You probably wouldn’t guess the real reason
Food & Wine magazine did some research into it, and the real reason came as a surprise to me: it turns out that Spain has actually been living in the wrong time zone since the Second World War. If you look at Spain on the map, geographically it should be in the same time zone as Portugal, Morocco and England; Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), that is. But it isn’t; Spain is in the same time zone as we are: Central European Time (CET).
However, this was not the case before the Second World War; before that, they were still on GMT. The Spanish leader during World War II, General Francisco Franco, decided to use the same time as Germany in order to live more in sync with Nazi Germany. And when the war came to an end… They simply never changed it back.
Will Spain change its clocks?
Not everyone is equally happy about it, by the way. In 2016, there was serious discussion about turning the clocks back an hour, but in the end that did not happen. Still, it doesn’t seem out of the question in the future: many Spaniards are in favor of the change. It would mean that they would have dinner an hour earlier, go to bed earlier too, get an extra hour of sleep as a result and wake up feeling more rested, also because their biological clock would wake them earlier due to the sun rising earlier.
To be continued, then, because there is a very real chance that they will eventually decide to turn the clocks back an hour after all and set them to Greenwich Mean Time. I’m curious.
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