Current time in Spain and other Spanish speaking countries
Qué más da una hora más o una hora menos, si la gente hispanohablante tenemos fama de impuntuales.
What difference does it make an hour more or an hour less, if Spanish-speaking people have a reputation for being late. 😅
When we are going to travel to another country, or perhaps we need to communicate (internet, telephone…) with people from another country and we intuit that due to the distance that country may have a different time from ours, we must find out the time zone in which is found to know the time difference. Time ago we used to make a simple calculation and that’s it, but now on the Internet we find sites that tell us what the current time is in each country. For example the current time in Spain.
So here we are going to show the current time in the different Spanish-speaking countries. And then we’ll talk a little bit about time zones and time differences. Besides, in this website I also have an article about how to ask what time is it and how to tell the time in Spanish.
Today is Saturday,
the 18 of January of 2025
This is the 18 day of the year.
And we are in the 03 week of the year (counting since the first Monday of the current year).
The actual month has 31 days.
This year February has/had 28 days, so this year has 365 days.
Current day and time in Spain:
The current DATA now in Spain is: 2025–January–18
The current TIME now in Spain is:
9:08 pmOr in the 24 hour format: 21:08
Notice that Spain is in the same time zone as the rest of continental Europe (Central European Time. GMT/UTC +1 hour).
It should be in the same time zone as United kingdom and Portugal (UTC +0), but it is not . Except for Canary Islands, that are in the Western European Time (GMT/UTC +0 hour).
Then Canary Islands subtract one hour to the time of mainland Spain, so the current time in Canary Islands is:
8:08 pmWhen you are in Spain and someone tells you the time don’t be surprised if they tell you in a funny way “Una hora menos en Canarias” (One hour less in the Canary Islands). It is a tagline that we have been hearing for years and years on television news.
Current time in Mexico:
Mexico has four time zones, but most part of Mexico are in the same time zones as the Southwest of the United States: GMT/UTC -6 and -7 hours.
The current TIME now in the central part of Mexico is:
2:08 pmOr in the 24 hour format: 14:08
1 and 2 hour less in West Mexico. 1 hour more in East Yucatan.
Current time in Argentina:
Despite being a so big country Argentina is in only one time zone. GMT/UTC -3 hours.
The current TIME now in Argentina is:
6:08 pmOr in the 24 hour format: 18:08
Maps of Worldwide time zones
The Earth, our home, a “little” marble floating in the Universe as it revolves around the Sun, takes 24 hours to make a complete turn around its axis of rotation. The result is that we only have light on the surface of the planet that faces the Sun, but as it rotates on an axis that surface changes. Thus the time of day in which we find ourselves at a given moment changes if we are more towards the East or more towards the West. This was not a big problem in ancient times, but as life on earth became global, the need arose to establish time zones, which divide the surface into 24 time zones, one for each hour of the day. In principle, this corresponds to taking meridians every 15º towards the East and towards the West, but we can intuit on the map that finally the zones that correspond to each time zone depend on many sociopolitical factors. We get an idea of the complexity of the task, of something that a priori as an idea would seem simple, if we take into account that a conference was established, called “Meridian Conference”, in which 27 countries took 14 years to agree on how to establish time zones.
