Spaniards Are Missing Their Naps

Maria Jose Mateo’s midday routine is a daring act of defiance against a force that has ruled Spain for centuries. The 29-year-old bank employee tries to stay awake.

Up at 6 a.m. after six hours of sleep, she works 8 to 3, has a heavy lunch at her parents’ home and dashes back to the office by about 5 p.m. to work till 9, leaving her father dozing on the couch and feeling quite drowsy herself.

As hard as she resists, the 40-minute subway ride usually lulls her into submission. At the end of the line, the stop beneath her skyscraper office, she wakes up slightly embarrassed, though she’s rarely the only one on her car who has fallen asleep.

This, for most workaday Spaniards, is what the siesta has come to. With Spain under pressure to adjust to richer neighbors’ timetables, the ritual three-hour break for lunch and a nap is disappearing. But the historic urge to nod off keeps fighting back.

Spaniards say they are working harder these days and sleeping less, feeling at once more prosperous and fatigued. Their economy has awakened in recent years to become one of the fastest growing in Europe--in part because of more industrious habits that, according to one nationwide survey, have reduced regular siesta-takers to 24% of the population.

The siesta is losing ground in other Mediterranean strongholds as Portugal, Italy and Greece also rush to catch up with their more advanced partners in the 15-nation European Union. It suffered a blow in Mexico last year when 50,000 public servants had their long midday breaks cut to one hour.

But only here, in the country that gave the siesta its universal name, is the trend bemoaned as an assault on a national icon. As Spain’s corporate culture spurns the idea of daytime dozing as unproductive, a vocal minority--led by a few sleep researchers and a nap salon entrepreneur named Federico Busquets--has rallied to its defense in the name of tradition and good health.

More than save the siesta, Busquets is trying to reinvent it. His Barcelona-based chain called Masajes a 1.000 offers victims of shortened lunch breaks a fast-food version of the siesta: a five-minute massage and a half-hour nap for 1,000 pesetas, or about $5.80.

With 16 franchises, the 2-year-old chain is growing sluggishly. For many Spaniards, the siesta is inseparable from the custom of going home to the family; the habit of napping anywhere else would be a change as radical as simply staying awake at midday. But Busquets is a relentless salesman.

“We are Spain,” he said. “Losing the siesta would be like losing bullfights or sangria or paella.”

Siesta comes from sexta, the Spanish word for sixth, because it is generally taken six hours into the workday. The long break has been traditional in many countries with stifling midday heat, but Spaniards claim to have done the most to perfect the ritual, which Camilo Jose Cela, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, calls “our Iberian yoga.”

Spaniards with enough time follow Cela’s prescription of taking a long siesta in bed, clad in pajamas with a chamber pot at the ready. Others swear by the “micro-siesta” advocated by King Charles I in the 16th century and refined by surrealist painter Salvador Dali: You nod off in a chair with a heavy key or spoon in hand, and the instant it clatters to the floor, as dozing turns to sleep after about 20 minutes, it’s time to get back to work.

Midafternoon TV is programmed to lull viewers. Documentaries on insects are the best yawners, siesta-takers say, followed by Venezuelan soap operas.

The siesta still dictates the rhythms of towns such as Plasencia, population 41,000, where construction noise several years ago prompted the mayor to decree silence between 3 and 5 p.m.

Long Breaks Are Increasingly Rare

But in sprawling, traffic-clogged Madrid and Barcelona, few working people have time to make it home for a nap, even during the three-hour breaks that some privileged public employees still receive.

In private business, breaks longer than an hour are getting rare as Europe’s single currency, the euro, draws Spanish companies, stock traders and multinationals onto similar schedules with clients across the Continent. Also, Spain has its share of Internet start-up wizards and other wannabe millionaires who seem to work day and night for weeks on end.

“We used to put on the answering machine and leave for a two-hour break, but clients started calling more often and hanging up on the recording,” said Gloria Garcia, a lawyer at a Barcelona firm with international clients that is now open all day.

Big city department stores stay open from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., forcing smaller shopkeepers to skip the siesta. More and more shops and offices have air conditioning to beat the summer’s midday heat, which often tops 100 degrees.

At the Madrid branch office of TotalFina, the French oil company, managers and salespeople are given coupons for nearby fast-food outlets--an incentive to take quick working lunches.

But the siesta’s biggest setback is a mass exodus of women from the home over the past decade. Spain is creating 400,000 new jobs a year, the highest rate in the European Union, and women are taking the bigger share, which leaves fewer at home to cook the hot meal that traditionally precedes the siesta.

Now it’s the workingwoman, still stuck with the housework, who most misses the nap.

“I’d love a siesta, but they’d have to enforce it by decree so nobody disturbs me,” said Mariana Caso, 44, who rolls cigars at a tobacco plant in the northern city of Santander. She also works for her labor union, cleans and cooks for a family of four, and gets by on four hours of sleep a night.

With so much conspiring against the siesta, employers and labor leaders favor contracts calling for earlier starts and shorter, more intense workdays. Instead of a 9 a.m.-to-8 p.m. day broken by a 2-to-5 p.m. siesta, for example, they prefer a continuous 8 a.m.-to-4 p.m. shift with a brief coffee break but no lunchtime. Workers facing long commutes especially like the idea of finishing the day earlier.

In many cases, however, this means less rest, not more, for the weary.

For one thing, Spain refuses to compensate for the earlier start by giving up its late-night habits. Most restaurants continue to wait till 9 p.m. to open for dinner. Soccer matches start as late as 10, political rallies as late as 11. Prime time on TV is 10 p.m. to midnight. On Thursdays, Madrid’s discos are crowded long past midnight with people who must be at work within a few hours.

High Unemployment Affects Workplace

Another problem, labor leaders say, is that Spain’s unemployment rate, a still-high 15%, enables some employers to demand extra hours without pay from their workers. One-third of Spain’s work force is on temporary contract; laggards are quickly terminated.

Abuses are rampant at construction sites, where illegally long workdays with no rest breaks contributed to 289 fatal accidents last year, union leaders say--among the highest rates in Europe.

Another union survey found that each bank worker in Spain last year averaged nearly 400 overtime hours without pay--a statistic that weighs on Mateo’s eyelids during her sleepy subway commute.

Paid to work 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.--her job is to plan work schedules for temporary employees--Mateo gives the bank four additional hours a day, believing that she’d miss advancement opportunities if she didn’t.

She has been rewarded with company-paid courses in business and English, but the stress is wearing. A colleague in his mid-30s recently suffered a heart attack--a thought that drives Mateo straight from work to the gym, which is open until 11 p.m.

“I’ve become accustomed to being tired,” she said during her lunch break, joking about the dark circles under her eyes.

She’s not alone. In a 1997 survey across the European Union, 30% of Spaniards said their jobs cause overall stress--the second-highest rate, after Greece.

Per-capita consumption of coffee has risen 10% since 1988 as Spaniards struggle to stay awake. While Mateo nods off on the subway, other well-dressed men and women slip away from the office to doze on park benches or in parked cars, usually seated with their heads tilted back.

Health Reasons Cited for Nap

Such scenes appall sleep disorder specialist Dr. Antonio Vela and have spurred him to campaign for broader acceptance of the siesta as a need, not just a custom.

The paradox, in the view of Vela and other specialists, is that Spain has undervalued its own famous tradition, leaving foreigners to explain its true benefit.

Vela and a colleague, Dr. Eduard Estivill, are publicizing U.S.-pioneered research indicating that body and mind function better when allowed to shut down twice a day--for a long stretch at night and a short one in midafternoon. The Spanish daily El Mundo devoted a 10-page section to the subject last year, marveling that Americans call siestas “power naps” and that some U.S. companies have “nap lounges” for employees.

“Oh, Lord, all our lives being ashamed of our alleged national laziness and it turns out that what we’ve been doing is complying scrupulously with our genetic code,” columnist Fernando G. Tola wrote in the newspaper. This awareness has come too late, he added, because “the men of profit have killed our sleep.”

With Spain’s corporate bosses firmly against the siesta, nap lounges are out of the question. Few people, even those with private offices, dare to sleep at work.

“It’s viewed as a sign of weakness,” said Alfonso Jimenez, director general here for Watson Wyatt, a multinational business consulting firm with 300 Spanish clients. “In Madrid’s professional environment, the siesta is for weekends only.”

But Masajes a 1.000, the sleep parlor chain, has found soft spots in the corporate hard line. More than 20 companies, it says, have taken its offer of group discounts for their employees.

Maria Begona Perez and three of her six law firm colleagues are midday regulars at a parlor in Barcelona, where dim lights and soothing music help them snooze face-down on the padded cushions of lilac-colored, ergonomically correct chairs.

“I can’t sleep with my head on the desk because the phone never stops,” said Perez, the 32-year-old office manager, who is often up nights with her infant son. After 30 minutes at the sleep parlor, “I’m more relaxed and rested than I was when I left home.”

Ernesto Bunuel, who used to work 14 hours a day as an advertising executive, knows the feeling and profits by it. Last year, he abandoned the rat race to start a family and work saner hours--as manager of Madrid’s newest Masajes a 1.000 franchise.

Spain is experiencing a backlash against its workaholic habits, he believes, and the sleep business is just part of it.

“It seemed a good idea to be on the crest of the wave,” said Bunuel, 42, explaining his new line of work. “In the 1980s and much of the ‘90s, the trend in Spain was to be a yuppie, work hard, make a lot of money and always be very busy. Now we’re seeing another trend--more free time, the family, taking care of yourself, the quality of life.

“This will create big demand for a modern form of siesta,” he said. “If I weren’t convinced, my money wouldn’t be here.”