Holidays in Spain

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Spain

An Hour Out of Line: How Spain Ended Up on the Wrong Clock

From 1901 onward Spain kept Greenwich Mean Time, the same time zone as Britain and Portugal, which made geographic sense since Madrid sits almost exactly on the prime meridian. That changed on the night of March 16 to 17, 1940, in the middle of World War Two, when the government of General Francisco Franco issued a decree moving the clocks forward one hour to match Central European Time, the zone used by Nazi Germany. Spain had stayed formally neutral in the war, but the clock change was widely read as a symbolic gesture of alignment with Berlin, made shortly after Franco and Adolf Hitler met at the French border town of Hendaye in October of that same year.

The change was described in the original decree as provisional, yet it was never reversed. Decades later, in the early 2010s and again around 2016, Spanish politicians and productivity researchers proposed returning the country to Greenwich Mean Time, arguing that the mismatch between clock time and solar time pushes meals, television schedules and bedtimes unusually late and contributes to shorter sleep. The proposals gained public attention but were repeatedly shelved. As a result mainland Spain, though it lies on the same longitude as London and Lisbon, continues to share its official time with countries as far east as Poland.

Roque de los Muchachos: One of the Clearest Skies in the Northern Hemisphere

On a volcanic ridge above 2,300 meters on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, an international group of astronomers built one of the most productive observatories in the Northern Hemisphere. Planning began in the 1970s once scientists confirmed that the site, on the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente, offered exceptionally dry, stable air and dark skies largely undisturbed by cloud or artificial light. The observatory was formally inaugurated on June 29, 1985, and today more than twenty telescopes from institutions in over twenty countries share the summit, run under the umbrella of Spain's Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

Among the instruments moved to the site was the Isaac Newton Telescope, relocated from an observatory in England because the skies above the Canary Islands proved far better suited to precise observation. In 2007 the observatory gained the Gran Telescopio Canarias, at the time the largest single aperture optical telescope in the world, funded jointly by Spain, Mexico and research institutions in the United States. The combination of altitude, isolation and the Atlantic trade winds, which often trap clouds below the summit like a natural sea of fog, continues to draw astronomers studying everything from distant galaxies to gamma ray sources.

Dividing an Unseen World: The Treaty of Tordesillas

On June 7, 1494, representatives of the Catholic Monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon met Portuguese delegates in the small Castilian town of Tordesillas to settle a dispute that had opened up after Christopher Columbus returned from his first Atlantic voyage in 1493. The resulting agreement drew an imaginary north to south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, granting Castile the right to claim and colonize any newly found lands to the west of that line, while Portugal retained the lands to the east. Spain ratified the treaty on July 2, 1494, and Portugal followed on September 5 of the same year, though a formal papal confirmation did not arrive until 1506.

Because so little of the Americas had actually been explored in 1494, the line was essentially a guess, and it later placed the eastern bulge of present day Brazil, reached by Portuguese sailors in 1500, inside Portugal's zone rather than Castile's. The treaty said nothing about the other side of the globe, so in 1529 the two crowns signed a second agreement, the Treaty of Zaragoza, to fix a corresponding line in the Pacific and settle a separate dispute over the Spice Islands. Neither treaty was recognized by the indigenous peoples whose territory was being divided, and other European powers largely ignored both agreements once their own colonial ambitions grew.

Twelve Chimes, Twelve Grapes: The Clock of the Puerta del Sol

Above the Real Casa de Correos, the former royal post office building on Madrid's central square, sits the clock whose chimes are broadcast on television across the country every December 31. The building itself dates to the 18th century, but it only gained a clock in 1854 after a neighboring church, whose bells had previously marked the hour for the district, was demolished. Today the tower keeps time with a mechanism whose quarter hour bells sound four warning strikes before the twelve strokes of midnight begin.

The custom of eating a grape on each of those twelve strokes to welcome the new year is generally dated to 1909, when grape growers in the Alicante region found themselves with a surplus harvest and encouraged buyers to eat grapes at midnight for good luck, though newspaper references to a similar upper class custom of eating grapes with champagne go back at least to the 1880s. The tradition spread nationwide as radio and later television broadcast the chimes live from the square each year, and millions of Spaniards now keep a small bowl of exactly twelve grapes ready at their table regardless of whether they are in Madrid or watching from home.

The Ten Vanished Days: Spain and the Birth of the Modern Calendar

When Pope Gregory XIII issued the bull correcting the long standing drift of the Julian calendar in February 1582, Spain was among the very first states in Europe to comply. Under the rule of Philip II, whose territories at the time also included Portugal and much of Italy, the government decreed that the day after Thursday, October 4, 1582, would be counted as Friday, October 15, erasing ten calendar days at a single stroke to bring the calendar back in line with the astronomical seasons. Only Italy, Portugal and Poland Lithuania made the same jump that same October.

The reform corrected a small but accumulating error in the old Roman calendar, whose year was slightly too long and had gradually pushed the spring equinox away from the date used to calculate Easter. Because the change came from Rome, many Protestant countries refused it for generations out of religious suspicion, and Britain and its colonies did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, a full 170 years after Spain. The ten day gap this created is why historians researching correspondence or shipping records from that era must always check whether a given Spanish document and a given English document are actually describing the same underlying date.

Jorge Juan y Santacilia and the Expedition to Measure the Earth

Born in the town of Novelda near Alicante on January 5, 1713, Jorge Juan y Santacilia trained at the new Spanish naval academy in Cadiz before being chosen, at only 22 years old, to join a joint French Spanish scientific expedition to what was then the Viceroyalty of Peru. Departing Cadiz in 1735 alongside fellow officer Antonio de Ulloa, the expedition spent close to a decade in the Andes measuring a degree of the meridian arc near the equator, part of an effort to settle a long running scientific dispute over the true shape of the earth by comparing the measurement with a similar one taken in Lapland.

The results, published years later, confirmed Isaac Newton's prediction that the earth was not a perfect sphere but was slightly flattened at the poles, a finding with direct consequences for the accuracy of navigation, cartography and, ultimately, time calculation based on longitude. On his return to Spain, Juan y Santacilia became the first director of a new astronomical observatory established in 1753 inside a castle in Cadiz, and he went on to help modernize the Spanish navy and lay groundwork for what would become the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences before his death in Madrid in 1773.

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