Spain endured the Franco dictatorship for more than 35 years. And, in some ways, Spain is still sorting out Franco’s legacy. This post is not intended to be an in-depth discussion of Franco, rather we thought we’d highlight two ways we personally are impacted by Franco’s decisions.
The first is the fact that Spain has been in the wrong time zone for more than 70 years. You can guess who is to blame. In late 1940, Franco elected to align Spain’s clocks with his fascist friends in Germany and Italy. So, even though Spain is situated in line with the UK, Portugal and Morocco (longitude), it is on Central European Time (CET), meaning its clocks align with countries as far east as Poland and Hungary. Although the Spanish government has considered returning to Greenwich Mean Time multiple times, this change still hasn’t happened. Interestingly, France changed time zones while under Nazi rule and never changed back either.
For us, living on CET means that the sun rises and sets later than you would expect based on our latitude. For example, this week the sun sets in San Sebastian around 9 p.m. and it’s not even May! In contrast, this week the sun sets in Seattle around 8:15 p.m., but Seattle is much farther north than San Sebastian – it is closer in latitude to Paris, which is an hour flight north of here. We are enjoying having long days in early Spring. And they will only get longer.
Many believe that the late-night Spanish lifestyle is due in large part to being on CET. We can understand this theory based on the sunrise and sunset times, especially during summer. Our lives have shifted later here. In part because school doesn’t start until 9:30 a.m. and also because Spaniards eat dinner so much later than in the U.S. We often don’t sit down to dinner at home until 8 p.m. and if we go out, dinner is usually at 8:30 p.m. or later (and that’s early by Spanish standards!). It is odd for us because we have always considered ourselves to be “morning” people.
The other Franco remnant is Spain’s custom of dubbing movies. Franco instituted this practice because it allowed his government to censor movies to avoid "undesirable" themes or scenes. And he invited the Catholic Church to help with this process. We understand that as a result, there were some odd changes to certain movies over the years.
Now, Spaniards are used to seeing movies dubbed in Spanish. You can see the “Version Original Subtitulada en Español” (VOSE) – but the number of showtimes available are fewer. We saw and enjoyed the Oscar winning movie “The Shape of Water” – VOSE. Unfortunately, we learned this weekend that our Spanish still isn’t good enough to see a movie in Spanish. Last Saturday, we watched the dubbed version of “The Princess Bride” on local television and even though we know the movie by heart, it was tough!
Overall, we’ve learned to like Spanish subtitles – we have them permanently turned on for Netflix, which allows us to get in some extra practice even when we are watching in English. You can learn a lot of Spanish swear words this way, depending on the kind of show/movie you are watching, and it is always fun to note when a subtitle is not quite what was said in English. Our Spanish is good enough for this purpose.
While we aren’t grateful to Franco for either of these two leftover policies, but it is helpful to know their history.
For now, we continue to adjust and adapt to whatever Spain throws at us.
Hasta luego,
Shana and Jeff
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