Spanish Hospo

Why the Spanish Get It, and We Don’t

I spent some time in Los Alcázares, a sun-bleached little patch of Spain on the Mar Menor. It’s not fancy. No yacht club dripping in private-school vowels, no Ibiza influencer playground. Just a clean strip of promenade, faded pastel shutters, and beach bars that smell like grilled sardines and cold beer.

And here’s the thing: no one’s acting like an asshole.

You know that feeling in a British seaside town at 9 p.m.? That low-level dread in your gut that the kebab shop queue will turn into a reenactment of Gladiator? Yeah—none of that. No bare-chested menacing, no “Oi bruv, what you looking at?” bellowed across the street. No fluorescent-jacketed bouncers standing like prison guards at the gates of fun. Just families walking with kids past midnight. Old couples still working their way through a bottle of wine. Packs of teenagers laughing instead of looking for a fight.

The place hums, but it’s not tense. And it hits you—Spain has hospitality sorted in a way we can’t even dream of in the UK.

Why?

First: the culture. In Spain, hospitality isn’t an industry—it’s a birthright. The bar isn’t a battlefield; it’s a living room with better food. Generations grow up in it. Your abuela took you for tapas before you could walk. You were drinking tinto de verano with your parents by the time you hit double digits, and nobody thought you’d grow up to stab someone over a packet of crisps. Drinking there isn’t the main event—it’s part of the background. A beer with lunch doesn’t lead to a blackout at 3 p.m., because you weren’t raised to treat alcohol like the last lifeboat off the Titanic.

Then there’s the economics. In the UK, owning a bar is like running an obstacle course built by sadists. VAT at 20%. Business rates that could bankrupt a small country. Licensing laws that treat everyone as if they’re a hungover teenager who just discovered alcopops. Security requirements that make it easier to hire a nightclub full of mercenaries than to open a pub. And when you do get customers, you’re taxed again for the privilege of selling them a pint.

In Spain? You can make a living without needing a five-page spreadsheet to prove to the bank you’ll survive the year. Terrace licenses are cheap. Taxes are lower. Staff costs are manageable because payroll isn’t loaded down with the same national insurance albatross we drag around in Britain. If you’ve got a couple of tables, a decent tortilla recipe, and the will to smile when someone asks for another round, you’ve got a shot.

Also—no obsession with “pre-loading.” In Britain, going out is an Olympic event. Smash four cans of 9% rocket fuel at home because God forbid you pay £6.50 for a pint, then roll into the venue already half-feral. That’s how you end up with vomit in the urinals by 8:30. In Spain, the night stretches. You might start with a coffee at 7 p.m., then a beer, then some food, then maybe a gin and tonic at midnight if you’re feeling dangerous. You’re never in a rush to reach oblivion.

And here’s the kicker: no bouncers. None. Not because they’re too laid-back to care—but because they don’t need them. When the social contract is intact, you don’t need a six-foot wall of polyester-blend intimidation at the door. Everyone knows the unspoken rules: don’t be a dick, don’t ruin it for everyone else. That’s it. Break that, and you’re out.

In the UK, we can’t even agree on the rules. Our nightlife economy runs on paranoia. Councils treat venues like potential crime scenes. Police see a pint glass and imagine a murder weapon. Every regulation, every license review, every planning condition is written with the assumption that the public is a mob waiting to happen. And maybe that’s the worst part—it’s not just the laws, it’s the expectation baked into them.

We legislate for the lowest common denominator, and then we get exactly what we plan for.

Meanwhile, in Los Alcázares, the highest drama I saw was a waiter apologising because my beer was slightly less frosty than usual. A five-second crisis, solved with a free plate of olives.

We could have this. We could build a hospitality culture that doesn’t need riot gear at closing time. But it would mean burning down and rebuilding our relationship with alcohol, changing the way we legislate, taxing fairly, and treating hospitality as something worth preserving, not a problem to manage.

It would mean believing that pubs, bars, and restaurants are part of the fabric of our daily life, not just places to get wrecked.

Spain gets it. We don’t. And until we do, we’ll keep staring across the Channel like it’s another planet—wondering how they pull it off, while we’re still mopping up the sick at 10 past midnight.