Country may go back an hour in time and adopt UK office hours
Friday, September 27, 2013 @ 6:11 PM
SPAIN is considering moving into another time-zone – that of the UK, Portugal and Morocco – and adopting a more European system of working hours in a radical shake-up of the country's traditional way of life.
Experts claim residents in Spain are living in 'a permanent state of jet lag' because of their clocks being an hour ahead of the time which would normally correspond with the country's latitude – and they say the long lunch hour and late evening finish is responsible for low productivity and poor family life.
Back in 1942, the dictator General Franco – an ally of Adolf Hitler – moved the clocks forward to coincide with Central European Time (CET, or CEST in summer) so that Spain and Germany were on the same time-lag.
This means that whilst the sun is in its most central position at noon, in Spain it is so at 13.00hrs, or 14.00hrs in summer when the clocks are moved forward.
It also means instead of eating lunch and dinner at 13.00hrs and 20.00hrs, as the rest of Europe and most of the world appear to do, Spaniards start lunch between 14.00hrs and 15.00hrs, and start eating dinner at either 21.00hrs or 22.00hrs.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com