Everyone knows that Spanish timetables are rare in Europe. While most Spaniards are still at work, Scandinavians are at home having dinner and, with the exception of Portugal, In no country do you eat dinner after 9 at night.
It is very graphic to check all this on a map made by the Instagram account loverofgeography, where it is clearly seen how dinner time is delayed as we move from north to south. It has a certain logic: the greater proximity to Ecuador, there are more daylight hours in winter, which allows delaying the schedules. But why is Spain, by far, the country where you dine later?
The truth is that, as many organizations have been denouncing for decades -such as the veteran National Commission for the Rationalization of Spanish Timetables-, most of Spain is in a wrong time zone.
It was on March 16, 1940, specifically at eleven o’clock at night, when Spain changed its time zone to officially have the mainland Time, that of Germany, France or Italy. And it is not the time it should have, considering that the zero meridian passes through the middle of the peninsula.
As it explains Javier Jimenez on Xataka, time zones were not established until the Industrial Revolution. But the arrival of the train made us need more precise timetables and coordinated to avoid accidents. Until that time, the hours of the day were established locally according to the apparent solar time. Breakfast was served at dawn and dinner at dusk.
Better have dinner sooner
During the pandemic, due to time restrictions applied to the hotel industry, it seemed that the Spanish would start dining sooner, but it is not clear that this change is here to stay.
It wouldn’t hurt us. As Juan Antonio Madrid, professor of Physiology and director of the Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Murcia, explained to us, all sleep and chronobiology experts agree that we Spaniards have very late schedules“especially with regard to the timing of the midday meal, dinner and the onset of sleep.”
However, continues Madrid, we start the day practically like any other European: “It is not that we are at all a country of lazy people. By getting up at a normal early hour, but delay dinner timessleep is also delayed. And all this makes us have more digestive problems.
Pictures | Loverofgeography/iStock
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