TWO in three residents in Spain want to end the twice-yearly clock-changing, according to a recent poll – and of these, seven in 10 want to stay on 'summer hours' for good.
Women were found to be more keen to end the so-called 'daylight-saving time', and the older a respondent is, the more likely they were to share this view.
National polling databank CIS found that 65.5% of those surveyed would prefer to stay in the same time zone all year, but want longer, lighter nights – 67.3% of women and 63.7% of men would rather not have to lose an hour's sleep on the last weekend of March each year, but want to be able to avoid this by not bringing the clocks forward an hour at the end of October.
Over 2,500 took part in the CIS poll between April 11 and 18, starting a fortnight after the last 'changing of the clocks' where Europe and most of the rest of the northern hemisphere went forward an hour, and most of the southern hemisphere went back an hour.
Although debates have been under way in Spain for some years about putting the country back into its 'natural' time slot – GMT in winter and BST in summer – around 70% of the CIS survey respondents want to remain on CEST, an hour ahead of BST and two ahead of GMT, for good.
'Daylight-saving time' was introduced during the petroleum crisis of the 1970s, but according to Spain's Diversification and Energy-Saving Institute (IDAE), the actual reduction in fuel use and cost to households is minimal, and not worthwhile as compensation for the sleep-pattern disruption and impact on productivity caused by widespread tiredness.
IDAE estimates that the average home saves €6 a year on electricity bills by changing the clocks.
The European Commission launched an EU-wide survey in 2018 seeking the views of the then 28 countries which had, by law, been observing daylight-saving time en masse for the past 16 years, with a view to possibly abolishing it.
And even though 84% of the 4.6 million Europeans who responded were keen to abolish the practice, the debate has long been shelved due to a failure to reach a consensus among the EU's civil service and heads of State.
Given that the Greenwich Meridian line runs through the very tip of eastern mainland Spain, the entire peninsula – except for Jávea (northern Alicante province), part of northern Catalunya and a slice of the Castellón-province coast – should, by rights, be in the same time zone as the UK, Ireland, Portugal and Morocco, and in fact in Spain as a whole only the Canary Islands are on the correct time.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com