Spaniards will have to turn their clocks back one hour during the early hours of Saturday 26th to Sunday 27th of October by the entry into force of this winter time 2024, a custom that is still alive“thanks to the myth of energy saving” as explained by the co-director of Time-Use Initiative, Ariadna Güell. As in previous years, the last weekend of October will force the time to change and at 03:00 on Sunday it will be 02:00, so from then on it will be dawn earlier but there will also be less sunlight in the afternoon as it will get dark earlier. The time change revives twice a year -when it is brought forward when daylight saving time comes into force and when it is put back when winter time starts- a debate on whether it is really necessary, which intensified a few days ago when more than 200 organizations signed the Barcelona Declaration on Time Policies to abolish it definitively.
An “outdated” practice
Güell describes this custom as “an outdated practice that is still alive thanks to the myth of energy saving, when the most recent studies tell us that this saving is not such, that there is no difference, just a little additional consumption by changing the time” and yet the measure brings“negative effects on health and economy”. The custom “seems to us to have been around forever” but in reality, he recalls, “it has been experimented with” over time and, in fact, the current regulations date back to 1940 when, just after the last Spanish civil war and with the German armies reaping success in the Second World War, “Franco’s dictatorship decided to align our timetable with that of Germany”. And this, “in spite of the fact that winter time is better adapted to the national geographical timetable than summer time” because “our geographical time, the one in which 12 noon is the time when the sun is the highest in the sky”, is in fact the same as that of the United Kingdom, Portugal or the Canary Islands. This implies that during daylight saving time,“Spain registers a 2-hour time difference with respect to its geographical time zone“, which is especially noticeable in Galicia, the westernmost autonomous community of the peninsula, where “during the summer season, the sun does not set until 11 o’clock at night”.
Will it end in 2026?
In addition, Güell pointed out that the time change has “negative effects in the short and long term” for health because “we end up out of sync between our clock time and the time of the sun” and that, he says, increases the possibility of suffering from sleep disorders, a risk factor for serious diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and even some types of cancer. “Right now 60% of the countries in the world do not have time change“, an issue that reinforces the claim, before the EU authorities, to also end this custom in European countries. In fact, a 2019 survey reflected that 90% of Europeans agreed with the possible abolition so that, that same year, the Europarliament and the European Commission prepared a project in this regard that, finally, was paralyzed by the pandemic. “Now the new European Parliament that has emerged from the elections will have to restart this process,” says Güell, who sees “feasible” an abolition of the time change in Spain by 2026, “if the European Union gives the green light”. In that case, the Government will have to decide whether to establish summer or winter time, although according to the barometer published by the CIS in November 2023, 66% of Spaniards would prefer to keep summer time.
When and at what time the time change is made in Spain
The time change in Spain and other European countries will take place on the last weekend of October the last weekend of OctoberMore precisely, in the early morning of the 26th to the 27th. Thus, we will enter winter time 2024.
Punctually, the time change in the early hours of October 26-27 in Spain will be in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m., which will become 2 a.m. That means there is good news: on the night before dawn on Saturday, October 26, you will have an extra hour of sleep. Don’t forget to set your analog clocks!
