If you’ve ever visited Spain from South Africa you’ll know that there isn’t much jet lag to deal with, but it might take a little time to get used to when everyone is eating dinner.

Spaniards regularly eat around 10PM or later, which is when our chefs are usually treating themselves to their first post-work drink, and most people attribute that to the “laidback Mediterranean attitude”.

It turns out the answer is something a little more complicated, because they’re actually living in the wrong time zone.

The BBC reports:

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…

In 1940, General Francisco Franco changed Spain’s time zone, moving the clocks one hour forward in solidarity with Nazi Germany.

For Spaniards, who at the time were utterly devastated by the Spanish Civil War, complaining about the change did not even cross their minds. They continued to eat at the same time, but because the clocks had changed, their 1pm lunches became 2pm lunches, and they were suddenly eating their 8pm dinners at 9pm.

After World War II ended, the clocks were never changed back.

Now living in the wrong time zone does come with perks, like really long summer evenings and sunsets around 10PM, but it also comes with drawbacks:

…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…

“The fact that the time in Spain doesn’t correspond to the sun affects health, especially sleep,” said José Luis Casero, president of the National Commission for the Rationalization of Spanish Schedules, an organisation that has been campaigning for Spain to return to the correct time zone since 2006. “If we changed time zones, the sun would rise one hour earlier and we’d wake up more naturally, meal times would be one hour earlier and we’d get an extra hour’s sleep.”

A two-hour lunch break that results in a decrease in productivity? Wow, I’m shook.

Much of it boils down to the bottom line, with tourists enjoying those late sunsets, but eventually you have to look after your own:

…economist Nuria Chinchilla, an expert in work-life balance at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa business school in Barcelona, feels that quality of life for Spaniards is more pressing than preserving an extra hour or two of evening light for tourists.

“We have continuous jetlag,” she said. “Tourism will always be there and tourists don’t care. The number of hours of sunlight will be the same, whether it is an extra hour in the morning or in the evening.”

I am inclined to support anything that involves an extra hour of sleep.

Last year Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced that the government was working on a plan to change the workday schedule, ending at 6PM rather than 8PM, a proposal that has sparked much heated debate across the country.

Must be nice to argue about sleep rather than corruption and the like…

[source:bbc]