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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks! It should be "Some Spanish people I know..." Sorry if I overexaggerated. It's just that over my life in student dorms, multiple unrelated Spanish people would be in the common kitchen when I was going to sleep (maybe still chatting after dinner), and they would be there when I woke up. This was blowing my mind.
I think when you use the word "siesta" in English (and many other languages), it becomes more specific than "nap". Like, if I take a nap at 8PM to go out and party later, I would not call it a nap. Similarly, when I was a kid I was napping while parents drove me to school - that I wouldn't call siesta either.
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
On the other side, those evenings with still a bit of sun at 10pm were awesome
I love Spanish timezone. During summer it gets bright right when you wake up and you get 5-6h of daylight after work. There's time to go for a bike ride or for a hike or spend couple hours in the sun at the beach. In the middle of the week!
In comparison in Poland the day is longer but it gets bright at 4-5AM and it gets dark about one hour earlier.
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.
”breakfast” spots OPEN at 1 pm
I have finally found my people. I must go there.
Yeah, that is not true.
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.
Restaurants usually open at 20 or 20:30, not 21.
Spain in also in the wrong time zone. Because of Nazis.
Have you tried adjusting your clock to local time?
Lies!
