Summer

Spain is, season-wise, a fairly conventional country: it has the usual four seasons, both astronomical and meteorological. There is no monsoon, no wet-and-dry divide, nothing especially hippy or politically suspect. And yet summer is special. Partly because it rather fails to behave itself. For a large part of the population—and institutionally too—summer and August are synonymous.

My own experience of the Spanish summer is overwhelmingly Mediterranean, coloured by media coverage that is nearly always Madrid-centric, so my picture may be a little out of kilter for people in the North or in larger inland towns and cities, but, that said, I hope this is a fair reflection of Spain in general.

There are all sorts of fixed ideas about August, most of which are no longer true. Maybe they never were, but there are seeds of truth in all the myths. You can tell that summer is on the way when all the adverts on the telly, and before your Amazon Prime film starts, show happy faces eating and drinking outside. If possible, the advert makers still try to feature scantily clad women.

Amongst the British colonies, you will hear regular complaints that Spain is closed for August. It certainly slows down, a lot, but I don't really think it closes any more. The ambulance will still pick you up and the surgeons will still crack your chest, should need be, but it's very unlikely that you'll get a call about your turn on the waiting list for cataracts.

The idea is that everyone goes on holiday. Once upon a time, it was the only real holiday that Spaniards got. All the rest were the equivalents of bank holidays, so no extended break except in August (well, July too, but we've already said that real summer is August).

The clichéd idea about the Spanish summer—the country stopping, with everyone on the beach and only a few benighted souls left behind to keep the office going—is out of date, as are so many of the textbook ideas about Spain. Spaniards eat late, true in some places, but nowadays lots of Spaniards work a full day, a bit nine-to-five-ish, with a shorter lunch break. As a result, they eat earlier in the evening too. The siesta is no longer the universal custom it once was, and neither is the old notion that Spaniards do not eat hamburgers, or that they somehow live on some separate, time-honoured national diet untouched by modern habits.

People holidayed in one of two places. They went to their pueblo, defended just as stubbornly as The Magnificent Seven defended their chosen pueblo; this was the place your family claimed it came from. It might be a house that, nowadays, was only opened up in summer, where several branches of the family—aunts, cousins, grandparents and anyone else—came together. For many families this wasn't the first option; heading for the playa, the beach, the coast was how most people imagined summer but, obviously, for others being reunited with their roots, going home, made for the quintessential summer.

We knew people who lived thirty km from the Portuguese border but spent all of August in Benidorm. And that too was the idea. You rented a flat that was as close to the front line, the sea, as your wallet or principal lender would allow. You rented it for the whole month. The idea was that the cousin could sleep in the bath, the granny on the sofa and the married couple in the big bedroom with all the children around them on the floor. Of course there were always strange people who chose to cycle across Spain or climb in the Picos de Europa or some such, but the countryside holidays were generally for other times of the year, not for August.

When we first moved to Spain in 2004, we rented a flat in the seaside town of Santa Pola. The lease was only for ten months because in July and August it could be let out for about ten times its usual monthly rent. In summer an extended family moved in and each morning they would traipse, in pavement-slapping flip-flops, down to the beach where they would set up camp for the day with beach umbrellas, mats and all the paraphernalia for the lunchtime picnic in cool boxes. Every now and again families would take a break from sand-crunchy picnics and head for one of the beach bars, the chiringuitos, or the front-line restaurants where they would indulge in something suitably summery—in this area that's usually paella, but it might also be all sorts of fried fish and seafood sold by the kilo. In other places it might be the sardines grilled on skewers over glowing charcoal.

There were so many men left behind by their families in otherwise deserted Madrid that a phrase, estar de Rodríguez, "to be a Rodríguez", was invented to describe the breadwinners who joined their families at the weekends.

Summer is the time when things like radio and TV stations lose all of their normal scheduling and personalities—the anchor for the main news round-ups will have a different face for a month and on the radio you'll find that your favourite programmes have disappeared for a while or are hosted by someone completely different. I've been quite surprised that both a political YouTube programme I listen to, La Base, and a young influencer type show, La Pija y el Quinqui have both disappeared for August so maybe even trendy Spaniards still observe the summer shutdown. 

What don't disappear are the fiestas and events. There are fiestas and events a-go-go in most of the towns and villages of Spain; bars that you thought had closed forever will spring back to life for a couple of months, and the villages that were apparently abandoned to only four old people, a mangy dog and a colony of cats will fill with SUVs and men in shorts burning meat on open fires.

When we were first here, I remember a survey that said that 10% of all Spaniards had never left their home province and the percentage of people who went on foreign holidays was minuscule. That's no longer the case. Nowadays those men who were once abandoned in the city are part of the breadwinning and childcare team. Maybe all the workers in the family will do a bit of remote working from wherever they pass the summer. The afternoon card games, the family board games and even the leisurely consumption of a few beers now have a rival: internet connectivity. Some of the break from routine is also gone. There was a time when the annual fair was a time to restock on household things and when going to the coast was an adventure. With a leased Volvo XC60 and one of those aerodynamic roof boxes, it's not the same sweltering adventure it once was.

Spaniards jet around the world just like any other Europeans nowadays and they get on cruise ships and do all those adventurous things in jungles, deserts and on mountains. They have days off work all year round, maybe with a couple of weeks still in summer, but they no longer try to cram a whole family into a 70-square-metre flat with only a simple fan to stop everyone from melting.

Spain has also become a country of rules. Building regulations have changed, neighbours are increasingly unwilling to tolerate Airbnbs filling their blocks with holidaymakers, especially the ones who sunbathe naked on the rooftops, and people are far less accepting of bars with giant speakers keeping everyone awake until four in the morning. The old anything-goes atmosphere has largely disappeared, replaced by regulations, inspections and enforcement. Good Lord, even the dogs can only go out if they're on a lead now—no more letting them wander.

Nobody has managed to do anything about the cigarras, cicadas and grillos that make the noise so characteristic of rural Spain and present in some parts of even the busiest cities. No longer are there myriad summer scares of salmonella intoxications when the "cold chain" is broken and the Russian salad or alioli becomes a lethal killing machine to rival Gerard Butler. Nowadays air-con is everywhere and it's not quite the same struggle to keep your beer cold, though it's still sensible to do as the home crowd do and buy beer in small quantities with frequent re-orders because if anything marks a good summer, it's sitting in the shade with an ice-cold beer.