Why Spaniards eat dinner so late

In Spain, dinner usually starts somewhere between 9 and 11 p.m. The reason isn’t only cultural: on the night of March 16-17, 1940, a decree from Francisco Franco’s government moved Spain’s clocks forward an hour, aligning the country with Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. It never got reversed, and Spanish routines stayed put on the old schedule, even as the clock read something else.

A time zone that never went back

Before 1940, Spain ran on the same time as Portugal and the UK, close to Greenwich Mean Time and close to the sun, since Madrid sits less than 4 degrees west of the Greenwich meridian. The 1940 decree put the country on Central European Time, the same zone as Germany, and the change became permanent in 1942. The Canary Islands, also Spanish, were left out and still run an hour behind the mainland, a gap Spanish radio flags when it gives the time with the phrase “una hora menos en Canarias.”

After the war ended, nobody undid it. Portugal, a next-door neighbor at almost the same longitude, runs on Greenwich time today. The two Iberian capitals sit a few hundred kilometers apart, yet Madrid runs an hour ahead of Lisbon. In 2013, a subcommittee of the Spanish Congress formally recommended studying a return to Greenwich time, calling more than 70 years in the wrong zone an “anomaly.” The report asked the government for an economic impact study, and the proposal went nowhere.

The clock moved. The body didn’t.

Spain shares this with Iceland, which never changes its clocks and also lives with them running ahead of the sun. When the 1940 decree took effect, nobody adjusted lunch or dinner to a new position of the sun. What changed was the number on the clock face. A lunch that used to happen around 1 p.m. solar time got relabeled 2 p.m. A dinner eaten as the sun went down, near 8 p.m., became 9.

More than eight decades later, the habit holds: a typical Spanish lunch now runs from 2 to 4 p.m., and dinner from 9 to 11 p.m. By the clock, that’s late. By the sun, the gap with the neighbors is much smaller than it looks.

The split workday matters more than the time zone

The time zone accounts for the first hour of lateness, but not the rest of it. Most of that comes from the jornada partida, the split workday built around a long midday break for lunch, still the main meal for many Spaniards. That structure pushes the end of the workday into the evening, and dinner further back from there.

The siesta often blamed for that midday gap turns out to be more myth than routine: a 2016 survey found 58% of Spaniards never nap after lunch. ARHOE, the national commission that has pushed for years to rationalize Spanish working hours, argues the real problem isn’t the nap. It’s a workday that ends too late and drags dinner, and sleep, closer to midnight.

The cost is sleep

The numbers on sleep back that up. Data from the Sleep Cycle app puts average sleep in Spain at 7 hours 13 minutes a night, less than in France, Ireland or the UK, and ahead of only Italy in that same comparison. A sleep specialist interviewed by The Local sums up the pattern this way: Germans and Spaniards wake up at roughly the same time, but Spaniards go to bed later.

What this means for visitors

• Don’t expect dinner at 7 p.m. outside tourist zones. Local dinnertime runs from 9 to 11 p.m., and many restaurants are set up around it.
• Use tapas hour to bridge the gap. Bars serve small plates and drinks in the early evening, which covers the stretch between lunch and a late dinner well.
• Book ahead for dinner at popular local spots, especially in Madrid and Barcelona on weekends.
• Ask at your hotel what’s usual in town. Mealtimes vary from place to place, and locals know where to eat earlier.

Next time a waiter in Madrid raises an eyebrow at a 7 p.m. dinner order, remember that by the sun’s clock, you showed up right on time. It’s the wall clock that disagrees.

Sources

• Time in Spain, Wikipedia: the date of the March 1940 decree, its permanence from 1942 and the Canary Islands’ time.
• Spain’s been in the wrong time zone for seven decades, NPR, 2013: the context of the time zone change and its effect on daily life.
• El Congreso aprueba el informe que plantea volver al horario británico, Libertad Digital, 2013: the Spanish Congress subcommittee’s recommendation.
• ARHOE - Comisión Nacional para la Racionalización de los Horarios Españoles, ARHOE: the commission’s goals on the split workday and working hours.
• Are Spaniards the world’s most misunderstood sleepers?, The Local Spain, 2024: sleep data, the siesta survey, and current mealtimes.