Why do we keep changing the time in Spain: should we turn the clock forward or back this Sunday?
There are very recurrent questions in our lives, and no matter how much time goes by we cannot find an answer that truly satisfies the doubts that generate them. This weekend is special: the time change is coming. Yes, two Sundays a year we have to play with the hands of the clock, a custom that digitalisation and domotics have relegated to the most antiquated objects. This Sunday we have to turn the clock forward or backward? Why do we continue to change the time in Spain? How long will we continue to change the time up and down in the middle of the night twice a year?
Daylight saving time has arrived, bringing us sunsets that last until 10 pm in the middle of summer. Sunny afternoons and mornings in which, over the next few days, we will notice that the sun rises later. The time change takes place in the early hours of Saturday to Sunday, when at 02:00 on Sunday, the clock will jump by 60 minutes to 03:00.
Time change in the middle of Easter Week
This time change always takes place on both the last weekend of October and the last weekend of March. Due to the calendar, this first time change of 2024 will take place in the middle of Easter Week, so we will have to pay attention to possible changes in the timetables of processions, as well as in trips back from holidays.
A 'boom' of doubts with the time change
The theory is certainly simple, so basic that it generates a boom of doubts. It is not the first time that the debate on whether to continue changing the time twice a year has been advanced. Spain should choose one time zone and that is the one in which it would remain fixed, but this 'leap into the void' still seems a long way off.
Until 2026 we are going to have time changes. This has been published in the Official State Gazette. This does not mean that in two years we will put a quick end to this eternal debate, but rather that the government is setting the two annual dates for adding and subtracting minutes to and subtracting minutes from the clock several years ahead.
It should not be overlooked that the European Union came to approve the end of the time change, but EU politics and its internal complexities resulted in a lack of agreement on the end of the time change.
These days we will see how the messages about saving money and the most infallible techniques for not spending more on electricity, water or gas with the new timetable are sprouting up. The truth is that day-to-day routines should not change, apart from the fact that the longer time zone with more sunshine will allow more life outside the home.
So from this very Sunday, weather permitting, we will see more activity in the streets in the evening. Gone are those evenings when it was dark at 6 pm. Sunset will arrive this Sunday after 20.20 hours, while sunrise can be seen at around 07.50 hours.
With regard to savings, there is no common position. There are professional consumer studies that indicate the possibility of saving up to 5% if we adapt our electricity use to the new time, but in 2019 the Ministry for Ecological Transition debunked the myth of savings with the time change: "There are no updated reports or proven experiences" that "allow us to assert that the time change is associated with energy savings".
