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SPANISH HABITS

What are the rules of kissing in Spain?

Seeing as the head of the Spanish football federation is currently in hot water for non consensually kissing a female player on the lips, now seems a good time to review the unwritten and written rules of kissing in Spain. 

Published: 23 August 2023 14:57 CEST
KISSING RULE SPAIN
Spaniards may kiss each other on the cheek without giving it too much thought, but a kiss on the lips is a completely different and more sexualised matter. Photo: Josep Lago/AFP

Spaniards are an affectionate bunch. They touch you on the shoulder or the arm to reflect friendship, they greet each other with two kisses and they’re very much in favour of hugging friends and family. 

But that doesn’t mean that anything goes in Spain, and there is a line to be drawn between what’s culturally acceptable and what’s taking it too far.

This threshold is currently shifting as it’s subject to changing perceptions brought on by an emboldened feminist movement that’s confronting sexual and gender violence which is ingrained in Spain’s patriarchal society. 

The country’s new ‘only yes means yes’ sexual consent law, spearheaded by the divisive Minister of Equality Irene Montero, has also meant that knowing the rules is all the more important. 

Kissing on the lips

A kiss on the lips is not a standard greeting in Spain, nor is it likely that a platonic smooch with a friend will be well-received. 

In a moment of extreme joy, such as an important victory, one may assume that Spaniards’ touchy-feely and laid-back nature would mean that un beso en los labios (a kiss on the lips) could fly, but that’s not how Spanish law views it.

A kiss on the lips is reserved for romantic partners, and if it’s done without the other person’s consent it can now be considered sexual abuse if the other person presses charges, a crime that can result in a damages payment to the victim, a restraining order and technically speaking even a prison sentence. 

As the 2022 sexual consent law’s moniker suggests, ‘only yes means yes’ in the sense that you should be getting explicit consent (¿Puedo besarte? – Can I kiss you?) before even the faintest peck.

It doesn’t exactly promote spontaneity but given the fact that consent or the lack thereof is subject to the interpretation of a judge, the best way to avoid any issue is to ask first.

Equality Minister Irene Montero has referred to the non consensual kiss that Spanish Football Federation president Luis Rubiales gave player Jenni Hermoso on the lips after Spain’s Women World Cup victory as “sexual violence”. Rubiales first effusively hugged Hermoso, lifted her slightly, then he put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her on the lips before giving her a slap on the back like a team coach. 

“Acts of sexual violence, especially less intense ones, continue to be invisible and normalised, but it is necessary to call it by its name in order to put an end to it. It is not just machismo, abuse of power or a sexist act: it is sexual violence,” Montero tweeted regarding the controversial incident.

Hermoso did not visibly pull back or react in any way that would suggest she did not consent to Rubiales’ kiss. 

She did briefly admit on a live video that she “didn’t like it” but later made a statement stressing that Rubiales and her have a “great relationship” and that it “was a mutual gesture that was completely spontaneous due to the immense happiness of winning the World Cup”, “a gesture of friendship and gratitude”.

Regardless of Spaniards’ opposing views of the incident, Rubiales’ unexpected kiss was clearly inappropriate for the occasion, for his position and for the current zeitgeist, all of which has overshadowed the first World Cup trophy won by Spain’s female national team.

It also serves to evidence the nuances and complexities which come with lunging in to kiss someone on the lips in Spain in 2023, perhaps a necessary conundrum if it serves to stamp out micro sexual aggressions in Spanish society.

Former Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy gives a supporter a big smackeroo on the cheek, acceptable behaviour even according to Spanish political protocol. (Photo by MIGUEL RIOPA / AFP)
 

Kissing on the cheeks

Kissing on the cheeks isn’t all that common around the world, meaning that foreigners in Spain sometimes get this traditional greeting wrong, which can lead to some awkward situations. 

Most of the time, when a man and woman, or a woman and another woman, meet or are introduced to each other in a social setting, they give each other two kisses on the cheeks. 

If it’s two men then they tend to shake hands or hug depending on how close they are. Spanish men don’t kiss male friends as much as they do in Italy or France, although it’s more common among fathers and sons.

It’s one kiss on each cheek, starting on the left side (as in your head goes to the left and your right cheek presses against theirs). This can be particularly confusing for kiss-giving nationals like the French who start on the right. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to involve lip-cheek contact either, often it’s rather cheek to cheek, lightly brushing against each other. 

Don’t worry, you are unlikely to be accused of sexual abuse for giving an acquaintance or friend two kisses as a greeting, nor are they ever likely to pull back (hacer la cobra, ‘do the cobra’ as this is colloquially known) given that greeting someone with two kisses is a tradition in Spain dating back to the Romans.

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SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Despite a top secret project to build them during the dictatorship, Spaniards have never been keen on the idea of nuclear weapons, especially since the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Almería.

Published: 15 April 2024 16:36 CEST
Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Spain isn’t part of the reduced group of nations that have nuclear weapons, which includes European neighbours the UK and France.

It has never tested nuclear weapons, does not manufacture them, nor has it bought them from nuclear allies who make them.

Spain is still a NATO member and doesn’t shy away from involving itself in foreign policy debates, often taking positions against the mainstream.

But it has still never joined the nuclear club nor have Spaniards ever really wanted to, even though former dictator Francisco Franco had different ideas (more on that below).

In fact, Spaniards seem to have an indifferent if not abnormally negative view of nukes, largely stemming from an accident by an American air force on Spanish soil in the 1960s.

READ ALSO: How important is nuclear power to Spain?

A 2018 study on state attitudes towards nuclear weapons concluded that Spain had “little to no interest in nuclear weapons.” Yet Spain still benefits from NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ defence and has nearby neighbours, including France and the United Kingdom, that are nuclear powers. It is also home to several American military bases.

In that sense, Spain balances a somewhat unique position of being pro-nuclear for other countries and as a broader defence deterrence at the global level, but not on Spanish territory because it knows that would not sit well with Spaniards.

But why is this? Why doesn’t Spain have nuclear weapons?

Anti-nuclear sentiment among Spaniards

According to an article for Institut Montaigne by Clara Portela, Professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the Spanish people are “sensitised on nuclear weapons, if not negatively disposed towards them.”

Much of it comes down to history and, in particular, an accident involving nuclear weapons on Spanish soil. As part of post-war defence and security agreements Spain made with the U.S, American nuclear weapons were kept on Spanish soil.

Spaniards weren’t keen on the idea. Portela notes that “their presence at the Torrejón base near Madrid was a controversial issue” among the public, but it was an accident in 1966 that really soured Spaniards to nuclear weapons after an American aircraft carrying a hydrogen bomb crashed and dropped the device in the waters near the town of Palomares off the coast of Almería.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best documentaries about Spain

The incident caused “one of the bombs to fall to the seabed and leak radioactivity” into the surrounding area, Portela states, something that would have no doubt hardened many Spaniard’s perceptions towards nuclear weapons, especially as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still in living memory for many.

A NATO-nuclear referendum

This scepticism towards nuclear arms was solidified twenty years later in a referendum on NATO membership. Though the government of the day campaigned for continued membership of the military alliance, it made it conditional on Spain also continuing as a non-nuclear power. A clause in the referendum consultation outlined this condition: “The prohibition to install, store or introduce nuclear weapons on Spanish soil will be maintained.”

Spaniards backed their continued, non-nuclear NATO membership by 13 percent.

A year later, in 1987, Spain formally signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), further cementing its non-nuclear stance.

And that was it — with this and the result of the referendum, Portela suggests that “the issue of nuclear weapons was all but archived. It hardly re-surfaced in public debates for decades.”

An atomic bomb of the type nicknamed “Little Boy” that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY / AFP)

The nuclear dictator?

Despite the Spanish public’s distrust of nuclear weapons, there was one Spaniard in particular who was quite keen on the idea: Franco.

In what may be one of the most terrifying historical ‘what ifs’ ever, the fascist dictator wanted to equip Spain with a nuclear arsenal, started a project to do so, and came very close to achieving it.

The ‘Islero Project’, as it was known, was top secret and lasted for several decades of scientific research until it was finally abandoned in the 1980s after his death.

Firstly, a brief consideration of the geopolitics of the time is worthwhile here, and it concerns the Americans again. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Spain immediately became isolated on the international stage owing to its support for Nazi Germany and fascist Spain. It was excluded from the UN and shunned as a real player in international relations.

As the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation grew throughout the 1950s, Franco’s fierce anti-communism combined with the strategic geographical positioning of Spain led the U.S. to form closer ties with the dictatorship, promising financial aid and image rehabilitation in return for allowing American military bases in Spain.

READ ALSO: Where are the US’s military bases in Spain and why are they there?

The Junta de Energía Nuclear was created in 1951, undertaking research and atomic energy development more broadly, and it sent promising researchers to study in the U.S. When they returned, the Islero project continued in secret.

Rather bizarrely, it was the accident at Palomares years later that actually gave the scientists the key to designing an atomic bomb. Unconvinced by the American’s explanations for the debacle, the Spaniards working on plans discovered the Ulam-Teller method, which was fundamental to the development of the thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb.

However, the project was then frozen by Franco himself because he feared the United States would discover that Spain was trying to develop its own atomic bomb and impose economic sanctions.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish scientists secretly restarted the project, but in 1982 the new Socialist government discovered the plans and disbanded the project. By 1987 the González government announced Spain’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT and the issue has rarely even come up as an issue since then.

And despite that, Spain is a NATO member, regularly attends the G20, and often plays a leading role on the global stage. Certain elements of the dictatorship had eyes on building a nuclear arsenal, but it never happened. Franco ultimately worried about the economic repercussions of being discovered, and Spaniards were themselves sceptical about the idea based on the experience in Palomares.

In terms of nuclear weapons, Spain is what Portela describes as a ‘de-proliferation’ state – in other words, a country that aspired to have nuclear bombs but reversed it.

It doesn’t look like changing anytime soon either. A survey in 2021 showed that Spain had the highest level of support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with a massive 89 percent majority.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain not in the G20 (but is always invited)?

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