We spent about 7 or 8 years wintering in southern Spain. Malaga, Torremolinos, Nerja, Almunecar and everywhere in between.
It took us about three years to figure out the local eating schedule.
Breakfast is about 8-9am and anything with a lot of food is usually a tourist meal. The Spanish live on air, coffee and cigarettes… if they’re feeling hungry in the morning, they’ll have a pastry.
Restaurants will seldom stay open beyond noon and won’t open until six. If you’re hungry at 3 or 4 pm? It’s better to starve.
Any restaurant that opens at 6 is a tourist place that sells a lot of basic fast food stuff.
The good local restaurants start opening at 8 pm and local families start arriving to eat at about 9 pm. The entire family, three or four generations of them will take up entire tables and sit around eating drinking and talking until about 10-11 and a few until about midnight.
They eat solidly about one good meal a day and snack the rest of the time with plenty of coffee, pastries or cookies but never to excess.
It’s why you will seldom find an overweight Spanish person of any age. They eat little and constantly move all day.
I miss that place and wish we were there right now.
I agree with your timings, but Spain has an obesity rate of over 20%, so I would say seldom is a serious underestimation.
Also, Spain is not a mystical domain filled with elves, of course people are lazy, over-eat, and snack in excess. They are human after all.
The Spain we saw was about 25 years ago. We saw the old Spain that was just transitioning to the Euro. Our first visits, we were actually dealing with Pesetas which made it easy at the time because a Peseta was equivalent very close to the Canadian penny. 100 Pesetas was $1 CAD.
Malaga still had a lot of old world charm as it hadn’t really changed in 30 years and looked like something from the past. The last time we saw it was about 8 years ago and now it looks like an American Disneyland … almost like the Spanish pavilion for a world fair or something.
And that old culture is what I remember. People were still living with little and the generation at the time remembered what it was like to be poor and their parents only ever knew life as being poor or living with little. Plus the country is hot like the desert in the summer … so all of it was conducive to everyone eating little because they didn’t have that much wealth and the weather made it uncomfortable to want to eat too much.
I’m sure it’s changed over the years but not by much.
TBF, they’re using central european time (which is centered on the border between Germany and Poland), even though they’re at the western end of their own timezone (with several parts being over the border to the next one) if our timezones adhered strictly to longitude. If you subtract 1.5 hours from all Spanish times, they’re considerably less weird.
School definitely does, and work does as well AFAIK. I doubt many people would be having dinner at 23:00 if most of them needed to be at work or school at 8:00.
Spaniard here.
School starts at 9. Work can vary, but 8-9 is common. Typical breakfast is coffee and a pastry, but some people will have something savory instead. Not the most common, though.
Lunch is at 2pm. Restaurants usually take customers from 1 to 3.30 pm. If you have lunch at home, a proper meal is in order, but lately, less and less people can do this. So snacking for lunch during work days is becoming more common, sadly.
Dinner is at 9pm but there is a tendency to move this earlier, particularly when eating at home on work days. Restaurants take customers from 8 to 10pm, and a dinner out can last until past midnight.
Nazis for Spain is bit of a joke. Franco wanted to suck up to Hitler who put Belgium, Netherlands, and France on German time when he conquered them.
Sounds perfect. A nation free of oppressive morning people.