Foreign Perspectives

One thing that you can always depend on is that the Spanish will arrival after everyone else and, usually, expect to be able to eat out in a restaurant no matter how late it is.

Quite why they’re so late is anyone’s guess as they usually have the least distance to travel, normally at most a couple of hours from Barcelona. Naturally, they expect to be able to eat quite late as that’s how things work in Spain but it’s quite a different matter in France where locally the restaurants usually won’t serve you after 8.30pm. That’s something of a problem in that the Spanish normally don’t even think about going out for their evening meal until 10pm by which time they’re limited to McDonalds.

Quite why we’ve so many Spanish arrivals this year I don’t know but it’s probably for similar reasons to our large German contingent ie high euro plus expensive “discount” flights meaning that the advantage is towards people who are going to drive here. August is a peak holiday season in Spain but in years gone by all the gaps that they’ve been booking this year have already been filled by the brits.

Of course, the big question is what’ll happen at the notional end of the holiday season here which falls this year on August 23rd? Historically, we’ve been fairly full with UK guests in the final week of the month but, as I say, there’s not so many coming from there this year (funnily enough those that have come have stayed for longer than the average of previous years).