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WORKING IN SPAIN

Is May 1st a public holiday in Spain?

Is Labour Day a public holiday across Spain? And do any Spanish regions have an extra day off on May 2nd? Here's what you need to know about May 1st in Spain, including a bit of history.

Published: 26 April 2023 10:30 CEST
Updated: 29 April 2024 12:37 CEST
Is May 1st a public holiday in Spain?
Is May 1st a public holiday in Spain? Photo: Thu Trang / Pexels

El Día del Trabajador or Labour Day in Spain is a public holiday in Spain’s 17 autonomous communities and is held on May 1st. 

In 2024, May 1st will fall on a Wednesday, right in the middle of the week. 

It will be a holiday in all regions across Spain, so no matter where you live you will most likely have this day off. Schools, most businesses and shops will also be closed on this day. 

Because it falls on Wednesday this year, several regions have decided to create what’s known as a puente or bridge. This is when other days are added to the bank holiday so that workers and families can turn it into a long weekend. 

This year, Thursday, May 2nd and Friday, May 3rd have been declared regional school holidays, in Asturias, Cantabria and Navarra. This means workers could take these two days off to get a five-day break. 

All workers in Madrid will also have a holiday on May 2nd, which commemorates the day in 1808 when the population rose up against Napoleon’s troops in the Peninsula War.

Like the regions above, schools in Madrid will also be closed on Friday, May 3rd, giving families the chance to enjoy a five-day break if they choose. 

READ MORE: What is ‘Dos de Mayo’ and why does Madrid celebrate it?

The Día de la Cruz or Day of the Cross will also be a public holiday in some places in the provinces of Granada, Córdoba and Almería, as well as in Santa Cruz and Puerto de la Cruz on the Canary Island of Tenerife. This falls on Friday May 3rd. 

Each region in Spain has 12 public holidays to which each municipality must add two more non-working days for local celebrations. This means that in total, there are 14 public holidays a year in Spain that employees can benefit from.

READ ALSO: How to make the most of Spain’s public and regional holidays in 2023?

Why is May 1st a public holiday?

May 1st is a bank holiday in over 80 countries around the world and is also known as International Workers’ Day.  

It’s an iconic date in the United States, called Labour Day and commemorates a general strike for workers’ rights, known as the Haymarket Riot on May 1st 1889. It ended with the death of those who later became known as the ‘Chicago martyrs’.  

READ ALSO – Spain’s public and regional holidays in 2023: How to make the most of them

At the time, workers were expected to work long hours for low salaries, which in many cases did not cover basic needs. Children worked from the age of six, and the women worked at night to make ends meet.

In Europe, May 1st was traditionally associated with rural pagan festivals celebrating the arrival of spring, but over the years it has become more about workers and is now recognised for its association with the labour movement.

El Día del Trabajador began to be celebrated in Spain in 1889, but it only became a public holiday in 1931. 

In 1938, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco replaced it with the Fiesta de la Exaltación del Trabajo (The Day of Elation for Work or Praise for Work), considering that the former was too closely linked to his communist enemies. That meant that for almost two decades, Spanish workers didn’t have a day off on May 1st but rather on July 18th. 

It wasn’t until 1955 that the original Labour Day date returned to Spain as Pope Pío XII added it to the Catholic calendar to commemorate St. Joseph the Worker.

However, only in 1978 with the advent of democracy in Spain were work demonstrations allowed to take place on Labour Day. 

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DIGITAL NOMADS IN SPAIN

Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Bars and cafés in Valencia, Santiago and Barcelona have started to take action against lingering remote workers and digital nomads by cutting off the Wi-Fi during peak hours, with some even banning remote working on their premises.

Published: 10 May 2024 11:02 CEST
Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Increasingly in recent years, a trend has emerged: someone arrives in a café, orders a coffee, opens his or her laptop and then spends the whole day working without buying anything else.

For many digital nomads and remote workers, it seems spending a couple of euros on a coffee is a fair price for occupying a table for an entire morning or afternoon.

Some might say they are contributing to the local economy and supporting local businesses, but clearly, for a small business owner this isn’t a profitable arrangement, and many are now fighting back.

In Valencia, posters have appeared at some cafés banning remote working during peak hours: 8.30 to 12.30.

One Valencia café owner told La Vanguardia: “Our place is small and between 10 and 11.30 in the morning it’s impossible, we need all the tables.”

Raquel Llanes, boss at the Departure Café in the Raval area of Barcelona, explained to Barcelona Secreta that the situation has gotten out of control: “We’ve had customers who have ordered an espresso and sat for eight hours, people who have asked us to turn the music down so they could have meetings, customers who took out their Tupperware to eat… At first we adapted the space with sockets and to work, but after two years we realised that the numbers weren’t working out.”

Some have opted for less friendly, but equally effective methods: turning off the Wi-Fi network of the premises during peak hours.

“The owner has got rid of the Wi-Fi to avoid precisely these situations. People sat down and didn’t leave,” one waitress told La Vanguardia.

Similar sentiments have arisen in the Galician city of Santiago, where one café owner told La Voz de Galicia: “We prefer them not to come. If someone comes in and opens a laptop we don’t tell them anything, but if they’ve been there for a long time and we need space for a group, we ask them to please move”. 

When a remote worker in Valencia posted a negative comment about a café where the owner had asked him to leave, their reply went viral, as they stated “we can’t lose regular customers so that you can work”. 

Remote working (teletrabajo in Spanish) has exploded in popularity in Spain in recent years, particularly in the post-pandemic period, and often the people taking advantage of this flexibility are foreign digital nomads and remote workers. Many of them choose to work from local bars and cafés.

It should be said that not all people working remotely in Spain are foreigners. Many Spaniards also have flexible or remote working arrangements and will no doubt occasionally work in a local bar or café. Equally, many digital nomads take advantage of the abundance of ‘co-working’ spaces popping up around Spain, which are exactly for this purpose.

There are even café owners who promote the ‘work friendly’ environment as a means of establishing a loyal customer base.

Other hospitality businesses have preferred to allocate an area for remote working while keeping the bar area and certain tables for regular customers who stop by for a quick bite or coffee. 

READ ALSO: The best co-working spaces for digital nomads in Spain

The row over remote working in traditional Spanish bars and cafés is yet another chapter in the current debate over the influence mass tourism and gentrification is having on Spaniards’ standard of living. 

In the increasingly online, post-pandemic world, the change has been stark in some parts of Spain. Take a stroll through the Raval or L’Eixample neighbourhoods of Barcelona, or the Ruzafa and El Cabanyal areas of Valencia in 2024, and you’re likely to see buildings plastered in Airbnb lockboxes and possibly even hear more fluent, non-native English than you do Spanish in certain parts.

Tourists and wealthy remote workers, the logic goes, visit or move to a trendy city they’ve seen on an international ranking, say Málaga or Valencia, which causes rents to rise because landlords in the area convert their properties into short-term tourist rental accommodation to meet the growing demand, which in turn turfs out locals or shuts down local businesses. 

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