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
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.
Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.
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.
They aligned their timezone to Germany to make Hitler happy. Seriously.
There’s two reasons for those hours.
- Timezones, as mentioned by several people here, you can mentally remove 1 hour for it to make more sense, Portugal is right next to us and their times make a little bit more sense. That doesn’t justify all the numbers shown though, and that because…
- They are fucking made up. Maybe if you didn’t go to touristic hubs you would find more normal timetables. Work starts at 8 so breakfast joints open at 7 if early, people eat at 2, they have dinner from 8 to 9, 10 if it’s eating out. At 11 people are preparing to go to bed in most of the country.
We do have family lunches and dinners occasionally, but that’s not an everyday thing, not even a weekly thing. Maybe a yearly thing. Sorry for not having huge houses and doing them at restaurants I guess?
Restaurants stop serving around 4 and start again after 7-8 because they need to clean between the lunch and dinner service. Wild concept I know. Also it’s not feasible to keep the kitchen staff there when nobody goes to eat.
The way you present the country is pretty racist to say the least.
Also hot weather means you eat later. You can see that comparing say Germany and Italy.
I actually upvoted before reading the last sentence.
Then I read the last sentenceThe way you present the country is pretty racist to say the least.
Dafuq?
Iberianophobia?!
It presents the ever famous image of “lazy Spaniards don’t work and have lazy hours.nothing is open ever”. That’s racist.
It’s definitelly Prejudice, and since it’s based on nationality rather than on race, it’s not by definition Racism (which is the latter kind).
But it is based on race, just an older definition of race. There was a time when southern Europeans were classified as the “olive race”. In the bollocks scientific racist hierarchies of the time, that put them below the Aryans, but above the Semites and the blacks. The Nordicist racists of course considered themselves the apex, and looked down on the rest. In the US you guys still remember how the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, the Jews, were very slowly integrated into the category of White, meaning they were not always considered White.
The caricatures of the lazy southerners are indeed racist stereotypes of this past era and to claim that they do not persist in the modern era is kind of weird, seeing how so many other racist stereotypes persist.
If racisms would be based on race then there would be no racism as we are all one race, the human race.
Two points:
- Sadly, in the minds of most people there are several physical characteristics which they see as making people different, so de facto there are various races because most people mentaly divide mankind into such partitions. Good that you don’t, but you yourself don’t get to deny that a certain way of viewing others that most of people hold exists, just because you don’t like or share it.
- Raceism (or in Spanish Racismo) - literally has no meaning if Race (or Raza) has no meaning.
Your “argument” is both egotistic and illogical.
My point is that people equate nationality to a race. So when they are talking negative about a nationality they are indeed racist by the standart of common speech.
If we get scientific and say people are only racist when they talk negative about a race, then the thing falls apart because there is just the human race.
I’m arguing that not just physical appearance is a race in the minds of people, as you say, but nationality too.
Lmao. You need to learn what racist means.
What does race have to do with anything said? Is Spanish (or Spaniard idk what’s correct) a race?
Light-skinned people are not a race either and they still treat people with darker skin as if they belonged to a different race.
It’s not only not a race, the whole thing is not even negative. It’s a clear example of “everything I personally don’t like is racism”.
I was on Tenerife recently. I arrived early in the morning (still night) and searched for a place to have breakfast. Most would open at 7 but I found one that opened at 6. The other customers were people on their way to work and pensioneers or people who just liked to get up early.
Delicious bocadillos and coffee and freshly pressed orange juice.
Spain in also in the wrong time zone. Because of Nazis.
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, but 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 casual chain for the timezone being so much different from solar time. Thanks for the clarification / confirmation.
”breakfast” spots OPEN at 1 pm
I have finally found my people. I must go there.
Yeah, that is not true.
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.
Restaurants usually open at 20 or 20:30, not 21.
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.
Also, Spain is not a mystical domain filled with elves
Eh, Disneyland, walkable European city – same difference!
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.
Have you tried adjusting your clock to local time?
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.
I’m Spanish, from Spain. We eat dinner at 8-9, maybe 10 if it’s out, 11 is way too late to have dinner, people go to sleep before 12. I did the same outside of Spain too because of habits.
Lunch is at 2pm too.
Siesta (aka nap, idk why people idolise the word when there’s a direct translation) is right after lunch since eating gives sleepiness appparently, but that’s not really a thing anymore, we need to work until 5-6pm and there’s shit to be done after that.
Idk about the Spanish people outside of Spain you know, but I’m from Spain, living in Spain. Oh, and most people start working at 8 although I try to find places where it’s 9-6 because I stay way too late, but that’s a me thing.
Yep, siesta. 1-2h after lunch. A lot of places close for 2-3h in the afternoon. Some people work 7:00-15:00 without lunch break. Over all a lot of people can take a nap around 16:00 and power up before going out at 21:00. Those who can’t don’t stay up that late. Sunset is around 22:00 so in many places at 19:00-20:00 it’s still hot outside.
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.
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)
