New Year's Eve: Spanish Style

New Year’s Eve, yet another holiday in Spain! It was an extra special celebration because my parents and brother were visiting from the US and were ready to ring in the new year Spanish style! 

In Spain, the place to be on NYE is Puerta del Sol. It’s the geographical heart of not only Madrid, but Spain as well. There’s a large clock tower in the middle of the square, and people gather there to watch it strike midnight, drink cava, and eat 12 grapes for every gong of the hour. It’s basically like the Times Square or Madrid, and everyone watches this clock tower on tv. I was excited to experience a big New Years celebration, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into!

While I knew Puerta del Sol would be crowded on NYE, I didn’t realize how actually packed it would be. I had asked a few people what would be a good time to arrive to Sol, to ensure that we would get into the main square and have a nice view of the clock tower. I was told to arrive around 9/9:30 and wouldn’t have a problem getting in. THAT WAS NOT THE CASE.

We arrived at 9:30pm to find that there were 4 huge lines to get into Sol. We decided to choose the shortest line, where the end was at the Royal Palace, ¼ of a mile away from Sol! There had to be at least 10,000 people in front of us, not kidding.

We waited in line for 2 hours, but still weren’t into Sol. Then at 11:30 chaos broke out. Suddenly the line began moving super fast, and then people just started running in a huge mob. Sol was at maximum capacity. It was everyone for themselves now! 

We weaved our way through the running people and made it about to the street were joy esclava and chocolatería de San Gines are located. Still pretty far from the main square of Sol, but we could see the clock tower at least! It was the size of my pinky fingernail, but we could still see it! 

We rang in the new year in a huge mob of Spanish people. The entire street was jam packed, and there was nowhere to move. Everyone was singing and so happy to be there, it didn’t even matter that we were basically sitting on strangers. The clock struck midnight, we ate our 12 grapes, which is a lot harder than it sounds, popped open the cava and celebrated! 

But, that’s not where our night ended. We decided that we needed to get into Sol at least some point in the night, so we made our way through the crowd. This took about 30 minutes.

When we made it into Sol, it was about 12:45, one conga line and some dancing with random Spanish people later, it now was 12:55. At this point we realized something was a little off. The clock on the tower still said 11:55, even though it really was an hour later. 

We were standing right in front of the clock when it struck midnight for the second time that night. Much to our amazement, they repeated the entire midnight celebration! People were eating their grapes again, drinking cava again, and there was a huge fireworks show again. We couldn’t believe our luck! We did make in into Sol for (second) New Year’s Eve! 

We had no idea why they repeated the celebration at the time and were pretty surprised. We were just so happy we got to see the celebration up so close! We later found out they celebrated live two times for the Canary Islands, who are 1 hour behind Spain.

After some more dancing and another Conga line, we headed off to celebrate another Spanish New Years Tradition, getting churros from Chocolatería de San Gines! We enjoyed our late night churros and then called it a night at about 3:00 am. 

I thought that Spanish New Years was going to be fun, but I never thought it would be this awesome! It was a night I will never forget, and always think about on New Years Eves to come.