Red Letter Days

The wettest April since Noah took to boating according to some news reports. We had Easter tide guests. We were confined to barracks. The Easter parades were cancelled. Sight seeing was off. We presumed the shopping centres would be closed for the bank holidays.

We Brits here in Pinoso seem to call bank holidays, Red Letter Days. I presume that's because the holiday dates are printed in red on paper calendars. I'm going to call them bank holidays because that's what I've always called public holidays. National Holidays are the same all over Spain. Most people will not work on those days but that doesn't, necessarily, mean that they will work fewer days in the working year. The Spanish logic is that bank holidays are not actually holidays, they are days when you don't work. So only the extra non working days need to be included in the holiday calendar. If, for instance, a National Holiday falls on a Sunday, like Christmas Day 2016, it will not be shown as a bank holiday because it is already a non working day. On the other hand Saturday is a working day so if Christmas Day were on a Saturday, it would be shown on the calendar as a day off and you wouldn't have to work. If you have a job that doesn't require you to work Saturdays there would be no extra day to compensate. There are up to ten days of National Holiday each year but usually only eight or nine of them are used because the others fall on Sundays - it varies from year to year. Additionally there are two days chosen by each Region. As we live on the border between two Regions, Valencia and Murcia, that sometimes catches us out. Last, but not least, the local Town Hall sets a couple of days off. Traditionalists, with a paper calendar stuck on the fridge might find that the one produced in Pinoso, in Valencia, shows as many as four holidays different to one produced in Abanilla, Murcia only a few miles away.

Yesterday, coming out of the the flicks, I was surprised to find the shopping centre, where the cinema is, open. Open on Easter Sunday? This morning, Maggie had arranged to show some people a couple of houses. She's heard Britons talking about how it's illegal to work on holidays and she was worried that the local police would drag her away in chains as today is a regional Valencian holiday.

I've written about this before but here it is again. I'm going to talk about Valencia. So, in general, in the Valencian Community commercial hours from Monday to Saturday should be fewer than 90. Businesses have to display their opening hours. Businesses can open up to eleven Sundays and bank holidays according to the annual timetable published by the Generalitat, the Regional Government of the Valencia Community. On those eleven dates the timetable is completely flexible and the hours are not included in the usual 90 hours per week.

For 2019 the designated Sundays and bank holidays are/were 13 January (for the sales), Palm Sunday (for lots of tourists), Good Friday (for lots of tourists), Easter Sunday (for lots of tourists), 23 June (two holidays fall close together), 7 July (sales), 12 October (which is a Saturday when two holidays fall close together) and, in the run up to Christmas and Three Kings, the 6 (Black Friday I think), 15, 22 and 29 December.

Some businesses can open when and as they like provided they fall into at least one of the following classes. That the business occupies less than 300 square metres and is classed as a small to medium enterprise. That it's a bread shop or a paper shop or a petrol station type business - the list includes things you'd expect like cakes bread, flowers, plants, magazines, newspapers, fuel, flowers, plants and prepared meals. Convenience stores can open when they like (there's a definition). Shops in places where people are travelling by land, sea or air have free rein to open when they like as can shops that sell mainly cultural products. Businesses set up to provide services to tourists are also in the list. The big exception, the one that keeps whole swathes of shops open, at least during some parts of the year, is one that allows any shop to open provided it is in an area deemed to have a lot of tourists. The Generalitat says what the areas are.

So there's the reason the shopping centre was open on Easter Sunday. Last Friday, Good Friday, we could have taken our guests to the Aljub Shopping Centre down in Valencian Elche. On the other hand if we'd foolishly extrapolated our Valencian knowledge to the Murcian Nueva Condomina shopping centre we'd have found the doors bolted on both Friday and Sunday despite Murcia having 16 Sundays and bank holidays on its list of exclusions.

Got that then?