You could happily spend all day eating and drinking wherever you are in Spain , and I frequently do. One thing just sort of slides into the next – if you’re doing it right. Be warned though, this means resetting your eating routine and having your lunch and dinner at least an hour or two later than you might be used to.
This means lunch sometime after 2pm and dinner at 9pm at the very earliest, although after 10pm is much more the norm. But why do the Spanish eat so late? You’re actually asking the wrong question. When the sun is highest in the sky in Spain, it is not noon but 1.
30pm. If you measure mealtimes according to the position of the sun, rather than what it is says on the clock, Spaniards are having their lunch at more or less the same times as the rest of Europe. Dinner, about seven hours later, matches their European counterparts too.
So the query should be: why are the clocks out of sync? Well, until 1942, Spain was on Greenwich Mean Time, the same as the UK. But then General Franco, in his dubious wisdom, decided to put the country’s clocks forward an hour in line with Germany, Central European Time (CET), or GMT+1. After the end of Second World War, Spain stayed on CET.
If you look at its geographic location, Spain is in the GMT zone. The Greenwich meridian passes through Castellón, on the east coast, so the vast majority of the country is west of it – as is Portugal, the Canary Islands and the UK, which are of course all on GMT. Galicia, in the nort.