- The winter time change arrives once again this year in the early hours of next Sunday, October 26 (Saturday to Sunday night), when at 3:00 it will be 2:00 (from 2:00 to 1:00 in the Canary Islands) and once again we will have to get used to the sun rising and setting earlier during the months with less sunlight
Winter time will start during the early hours of this Saturday, October 25 to Sunday 26, when at 03:00 it will become 02:00. In accordance with current regulations, this time will extend in principle until the early hours of March 28 to 29, 2026.
The time change is a custom in Western countries that was introduced during the First World War following the energy-saving initiative promoted by Germany in 1916 to save coal, a measure copied by other countries and later fell into disuse until many reinstated the measure in the late 1970s with the oil crisis.
The member countries of the European Union legislated in a coordinated manner for the first time in this regard in 1981, transposing successive European directives into their legal systems each year, until Spain approved Directive 2000/84/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council in 2002, which has been successively renewed every four years until the last order PCM/186/2022, of March 11. According to these official data, the last currently scheduled time change in Spain would be on October 25, 2026.
OPEN DEBATE WITH NO DECISION MADE
The European Commission announced in 2019 its intention to end the time change and let each country choose which time to keep (summer or winter time).
In 2018, the European Parliament opened the debate on whether to continue with the time change in the European Union, and the Commission conducted a public consultation in which more than 80% of the 4.6 million participating citizens were in favor of ending the time changes.
The European Executive proposed, at the initiative of Finland, to end this practice and make March 2019 the last time change, but the lack of consensus among States on which time to adopt—winter or summer—and impact assessment studies delayed the decision to cancel it. In the first instance, the initiative to eliminate the biannual time change went forward, although the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism ultimately opted not to remove it to “leave more time” for countries to decide which time to keep.
European Directive 2000/84/EC of 2019 established that from 2021 European countries could eliminate this obligation if they so considered, and some like Spain and Portugal decided to continue with the seasonal time change and did not take a position regarding which time zone to implement (summer or winter).
In Spain, the only information the Government had at that time to make this decision was a survey by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) in which 65% of respondents expressed a preference for remaining on summer time. There was also a report from a committee of experts created by the Government in September of that year to decide which time was more appropriate, although it did not reach any “conclusive resolution,” given the “large number of impact repercussions” that this measure has in areas such as the economy and culture.
In their report, dated March 20, 2019, they concluded that “it was not advisable to make any ‘hasty change’ in time zones as long as there was no ‘shared consensus’ and a ‘practical dissemination to our citizens of the risks and opportunities it entails.'”
Thus, with the years of pandemic restrictions in between, an order from the Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory published in 2023 establishes the dates for the time changes until Sunday, October 25, 2026, when Spain will enter winter time once again.
Source: Expansión