Aha: that's why they always eat so late in Spain
Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: Aha: that's why they always eat so late in Spain.
Only sitting at the table around eleven o'clock in the evening; I often associate this with vacation. Spain is one of my favorite countries and even eleven o'clock there is quite reasonable. I often wondered how they manage to do that there. I'm on vacation, so I don't necessarily have to do anything the next morning. But how do the locals do it who just have to work the next morning? And especially: why do they actually do it?
So I always thought it had to do with the heat; it only cools down a bit late in the evening and then it's nice to go eat. Before that, it's just too hot. That seemed completely logical to me. But also completely wrong.
You wouldn't guess the real reason so quickly
The magazine Food & Wine has researched it and I didn't see the real reason coming: it turns out that Spain has actually been living in the wrong time zone since World War II. If you look at Spain on the map, it should geographically be in the same time zone as Portugal, Morocco, and England; Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). But it isn't: Spain is actually in the same time zone as us: Central European Time (CET).
However, this was not the case before World War II; they were still on GMT then. The Spanish leader during WWII, General Francisco Franco, decided to align with Germany's time to live more in sync with Nazi Germany. And when the war ended, they simply never reversed it.
Are they going to change the clock in Spain?
Not everyone is equally happy about it, by the way. In 2016, there was serious talk about moving the clock back an hour, but that ultimately did not happen. Still, it doesn't seem excluded in the future; many Spaniards are in favor of the change. It would mean that their dinner time is moved an hour earlier, that they also go to bed earlier, and therefore have an hour longer sleep and wake up more rested, also because their biological clock wakes them up earlier due to the sun rising earlier.
To be continued, because there is a very real chance that it will be decided to go back an hour and set the clock to Greenwich Mean Time. I'm curious.
