Scientists are about to prove that space and time are infinite. Spanish bars are their evidence
You don’t make plans to go to the bar. You go to the bar to make plans.
First, forget the bar you probably have in mind. A Spanish bar is not somewhere you wait until Friday night to visit, dress up for, book a table at, or necessarily even drink alcohol in. It can be the place where you have coffee and toast at 8 in the morning, tortilla at eleven, a caña at one, lunch at three, another coffee at five, watch football at nine and, somehow, end up with a gin tonic at midnight. Kids are there. Grandparents are there. Someone is reading the newspaper. Someone is having a business meeting. Someone else came in alone and is perfectly happy about it. Every Spaniard eventually finds THEIR BAR: not necessarily the coolest, prettiest or best-rated one, just theirs. The one where you know who’s behind the counter, they know what you want, and you can walk in without having any particular reason to be there.
And here’s the first law of Spanish bar physics: the smaller the bar, the bigger it seems to be. There are no reservations, no host asking how many you are, and very little interest in the concept of fully booked. A Spanish bar is full. You go in anyway. Donde caben dos, caben tres — where two fit, three fit. No table? Stand at the counter. Counter full? There’s a stool. The stool is now a table. A bench works. A little wall outside works. Steps? They work too. Eventually, the bar escapes through its own front door: first the pavement, then the street, until the people outside one bar start mixing with the people outside the next one. Spain has roughly one bar for every 300 people and somehow we still end up standing. If we ever manage to fill the entire street, I assume we’ll just start opening our houses. You know where a Spanish bar starts. Nobody really knows where it finishes.
Time works roughly the same way. There is no correct hour for a Spanish bar because the bar changes with you. Morning smells like coffee and toasted bread; lunchtime brings beer, vermouth, wine, tapas and people standing three deep at the counter; afternoons slow down over coffee; evenings bring friends, food and football; nights eventually introduce copas. And this is where the second law of Spanish bar physics appears: you don’t make plans to go to the bar; you go to the bar to make plans. You stop for a coffee. Someone walking past sees you through the window and comes in “for five minutes.” Another person appears. Someone calls someone else. Coffee becomes a caña — a small draft beer — the caña becomes aperitivo, and suddenly your completely unplanned afternoon has twelve people in it. Eventually somebody says “la última” — the last one. This is perhaps the least reliable phrase in the Spanish language, because la última very often means the last one HERE. Someone is already asking: “What’s the next bar?”
And maybe that’s why the bar tells you more about Spain than almost anywhere else. It’s incredibly democratic: the businessman, the construction worker, the grandmother, the student, the family with three children and the man who has occupied the same corner since 1997 can all share the same counter. Give us some olives, a few drinks and enough time and we’ll start fixing the world. Politics, football, traffic, the economy, international conflicts: all solved before dinner, usually by people with absolutely no qualifications to solve any of them. And while the bars and the drinks change dramatically from region to region — we’ll save that argument for another newsletter — cider in Asturias, pintxos in the Basque Country, seafood in Galicia, vermouth in Madrid, tapas and cold beer further south, the essence somehow survives. Different languages, accents, food, music and landscapes; same bar. It is our living room with its doors open to the street: somewhere to eat, drink, meet, argue, celebrate, do business, take the kids, be alone without really being alone, and accidentally spend much longer than planned.
When an old neighbourhood bar closes, we don’t just lose a business. Hundreds of stories disappear with it. First dates, bad dates, business ideas, football celebrations, arguments nobody remembers, friendships that started by accident and thousands of “just one and I’m going home” that turned out to be complete lies. There’s a famous Spanish song that says “Bares, qué lugares” — What a place a bar can be!. Maybe they got it right. If you really want to understand Spain, don’t start with the monuments. Go to a bar. Don’t reserve. Don’t ask if there’s space. Just walk in. Infinity has to start somewhere.