Inside the nocturnal world of Spain’s impossibly late-night economy–before politicians turn the lights on.
In Spain, a raucous, late-night argument has broken out on a patio, and those in earshot are finding it increasingly hard to ignore. On one side is the traditionalist, who’s been reveling in a long, warm night after a long, hard day at work and has been enjoying splashing his cash. He plans to stay out later, but the waiter he’s arguing with has had enough. The beleaguered staff member desperately wants to go home. She hoped to do so two hours ago, but the customer won’t do the polite thing and pack it in. The argument is getting louder, and the neighbors are getting pissed off.
This debate has been raging across the restaurants, cafes, and dinner tables of Spain for years, and now politicians are taking sides. Some, like Spain’s leftwing labor minister Yolanda Díaz, argue on behalf of the weary workers.
“A country that has its restaurants open at one o’clock in the morning is not reasonable. It is madness to continue extending opening hours until who knows what time,” she said earlier this year, floating the idea of legislating for earlier closing times.
This prompted populist right-winger Isabel Díaz Ayuso to fire right back on behalf of “freedom” and “employment.”
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“They want us puritans, materialists, socialists, without soul, without light, and without restaurants. [They want us] bored and at home,” said Ayuso, the president of the Madrid region.
Just a few years ago, Ayuso and her allies had pushed for similar employment reform to what Diaz is fighting for now. In 2024, Spain–like many other countries–had forgotten the reform in favor of partisan scrap.
Those fighting for reform argue that until recently, Spain was never like this–and geographically, it shouldn’t be. In 1940, fascist dictator General Francisco Franco ordered the country’s clocks to jump forward an hour to be aligned with his Nazi allies, meaning Spain was in a time zone that stretched 1,500 miles from its western extremities to the eastern edge of Poland.
In Galicia, in the far northwest, the sun doesn’t rise until 9 a.m. in the winter. Only the Canary Islands, which sit about 60 miles west of Morocco, are allowed to align themselves with the time zone of Portugal and the U.K.
Being 60 minutes behind the “correct” time zone means the sun rises and sets later, gifting Spain with gloriously long summer evenings and 10 p.m. sunsets. For a country that recently hit new temperature highs of 117.7 °F (47C), it makes sense that things might slow down a little mid-afternoon and get going again in the cool of the evening.
If Spain had continued to follow the working patterns of its neighbors to the west, the reformists argue, the night-time economy would be a little less extreme. Bars would close one hour earlier, waiters would be home at a better time, and neighbors could get some sleep. But it doesn’t, and they don’t, and now the schedule is both firmly culturally ingrained and a major part of Spain’s draw as a destination for Northern Europeans and Americans looking to escape the rigidity of home.
It’s easy to understand how appealing this set up is to tourists and why so many now come. Last year, Spain set a new record when 85.1 million foreign visitors arrived, 15 million of which were Brits and around two million Americans.
I was in their number, enjoying my first trip to the south of the country, where a friend put me up in his Malaga flat. For a week, I scorched myself on the beach in the day and stayed up into the small morning hours on the tarraza (patio) of a new bar each night. The Londoners in our midst loved getting in rounds of poured-by-eye €3 ($3.24) gin and tonics and €5 jugs of watery, delicious table wine. It was undeniably lovely to be liberated from £7 ($8.89) pints we have grown used to in the U.K. capital and last-order calls that are creeping further and further to the wrong side of 11 p.m.
Even in my sunbaked holiday haze, the mastery of the city’s hospitality staff was impossible to miss. In jam-packed bars, multilingual waiters hot-step through the throngs, making sure groups have their tables filled with delicious tapas and glasses of Tinto de Verano before producing a remarkably small but accurate bill as the night’s joyful chaos comes to an end.
“Spain has the best nightlife in the world, with streets full of life and freedom,” Ayuso argues.
After witnessing and benefiting from the country’s hospitality magic, it’s hard to disagree.
It’s not just right-wing politicians and Brits abroad who love this side of Spain. They are joined by a large proportion of those in the hospitality industry, albeit mostly those in senior positions.
Pablo Viladomiu owns two restaurant-bars in Barcelona, including one in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district to the west, and has been in the industry for nine years. In his view, joints like his serve an important public function.
“Our idea is to open for as long as possible in order to offer the best service to the neighborhood and our neighbors. So we are open every day of the week from 9 a.m. until after dinner at midnight. The only time we close is Sunday afternoon,” he tells me.
As much as the city’s local laws give the bar a hard midnight cut-off outdoors, Pablo argues owners are always conscious of demand and being a nuisance when figuring out their opening hours.
“If a business sees that its terrace does not work after 11 p.m., it is normal for it to close. Or if it prefers to avoid conflicts with neighbors due to noise–as in our case, since ultimately they are our clients and we owe it to them–well then we prefer to be closed.”
This considerate attitude pairs well with a widely adopted approach to eating out in Spain that allows bars and restaurants to function as a genuine third space.
Alastair Johnson helps international people set up in the country via his firm, Moving to Spain, and loves the late-night culture–even when his kids found themselves hungry, grumpy, and unable to eat until 10 p.m. during one trip to San Sebastian.
“Meals take much longer here. You chat before, during, and after. The Spanish even have an expression ‘sobremesa’ to describe sitting around nattering after the eating and drinking is done. If we have lunch out on the weekend starting at 2:30 p.m., it may not finish until 5:30 p.m., in which case we just skip dinner altogether,” he explains.
“It is precisely these freedoms that make Spain attractive to foreigners.”
Sitges resident and owner of holiday let firm Utopia Villas, Miriam Burke, argues for this way of life by evoking seemingly never-ending summer evenings dining alfresco.
“It is not uncommon in the summer months to see full families enjoying the evening until 1 a.m., with kids playing football in the plazas while the parents enjoy an after-dinner drink. It is precisely these freedoms that make Spain attractive to foreigners.”
Who could want to damage such a refined pursuit? Or lose the freedom to socialize as you see fit?
“Nobody wants to be dictated to about what time they should go home,” Burke’s partner Emilio Sierra puts it bluntly.
In truth, there are a lot of people in Spain who would like to do so. And many of them are tired, overworked, and underpaid waiters, bartenders, chefs, and kitchen staff.
“The problem isn’t just the end time, but also the hours worked. Many of these are in the black as well,” one waiter in Barcelona tells me on condition of anonymity, referring to the alluded practice of skirting labor laws by paying staff overtime in cash.
Some of those in the industry who feel unable to speak openly have their concerns voiced by Soy Camarero, a waiter turned comedian and writer with an enormous following online.
Soy amplifies his followers’ trials and tribulations in the industry on his platforms, whether they are job seekers offered 56 hours of work a week for €6 an hour or waiters charged €5 for every accidentally broken glass.
His posts make weekly news in Spain, where Soy’s satirical novel I Am a Waiter. The Customer Is NOT Always Right is a hit. With the average waiter earning just €19,500 a year, according to Talent.com, while sitting at the sharp end of a culture that gets the least sleep of any in Western Europe, it is easy to see why.
So, where does all of this leave Díaz’s hopes of change? None of the many hospitality workers I have spoken to believe significant national reform is implementable or even possible, given the febrile state of Spanish politics and the upheaval it would cause to an industry that produces 11.6% of the country’s GDP.
Where people do see hope is in a shift away from the mass tourism that is fueling this industry and turning it in a direction neither side of the debate wants. This is the call of tens of thousands of protestors who have been hitting the streets of Majorca and Tenerife this year, sick and tired of staying up all night serving two-for-one drink deals for wages that fall further and further behind decent rent.
It is probably in the protestors’ outrage at the neon strips of Magaluf and the way they’ve eroded large stretches of Spain’s island culture that they may find allies on the other side of the tarraza.