Nightlife in Spain
Nightlife in Spain is great! I mean, even Segovia (the little village we live in, near Madrid) has a few clubs. All students from our university can be found in Canavans-Theatre on thursday. When you step foot there it seems like a regular small irish pub, but when you continue walking you enter a club, which kind of looks like an old circus. In this club the party doesn’t start to get lit until after 2-3 am, which is regular in Spain. I know, this is very late, but if you ever visit Segovia don’t feel demotivated to go for the nightlife experience, because there are some great places to start the night earlier. Destino, Sabbat, Palace, la Luna and Mandala are great if you are done pregaming and want to start dancing around midnight. Another option: we all know that Spain is known for its wonderful tapas and some of these tapabars don’t close before everybody is satisfied for the whole night (examples: El sitio, Nueva Tasquina and el Saxo). Another great bar worth mentioning is ‘La Guagua’. This cocktail bar is a combination of a place where you can dance and where you can eat tapas. But these tapas are not the tapas you are imagining right now: they serve candy in a basket with every order.
You are probably wondering: “if a little Spanish town already has so many places to party, what would nightlife in Madrid be like?”. A woman in Barcelona told us that Madrid is the capital of nightlife in Europe. It has so many clubs and bars you can go and discover, but the biggest club is ‘Teatro Kapital’, which has 7 floors and a capacity of more than 10,000 people. Check out the video to see some of our party experiences in Spain. Teatro Kapital, which is recognizable by the white balconies of the first four floors, is well presented in the video. We also enjoyed the parties in Malaga, Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, Platja d'Aro and Valencia.
Partying as a Girl
Speaking of which, I asked 5 girls of different nationalities (including my Dutch self haha) if they feel safe shaking their booty in Spanish clubs.
When I was writing the previous line, I suddenly had a flashback to a traumatic experience (okay, it was not that bad, but it certainly had an impact on me). When I was sixteen and experiencing my first parties in bars, a guy who was in his early 20’s, came to me and said: “If you dance like that, guys will think that you want something from them”. I wasn’t able to dance for the whole night after that, and years later his voice was still somewhere in the back of my mind. At that point of my life all I wanted was to dance, feel the music, have fun and destress myself. I wasn’t busy with wanting to fix a boy at all and I didn’t even see that guy before he came to me. So, I didn’t see that coming and it gave me a wrong image of guys in clubs and how girls should behave.
I am telling you this, because it is important that you feel like you can be yourself while going out and that you can dance however you feel like, and I finally realised that you can. So, don’t hold yourself back girls, it will only make you feel uncomfortable! Just because I came across one rotten apple doesn’t mean all men are alike. While partying in Spain I realized this even more, because the typical party music of Spain is reggaeton and the only way to dance to this is to move your hips. I love it!
Partying as a Girl in Spain
I asked a German, Turkish, Peruvian and a North American girl about the guys in Spain and we discovered that they are the perfect balance between guys from the previous mentioned countries: they like to dance, they can have normal conversations and they are not afraid to compliment you.
In Peru the guys don’t ask you to dance. There is less conversation and they just grab you by the hand and later try to dance closer with you. In Spain there are more steps for the same goal: you have a conversation, they ask if they can buy you a drink, you dance and then you are the one to decide what happens next. That there are more steps for the same goal is common in Europe. Except that Dutch and German guys often skip on the dancing. It is really nice to see both genders on the dancefloor.
The girl from the United States also agreed on the conversation part: “You can have a conversation that is not in particular flirty”. In the US the guys are more direct: “let me buy you a drink” and sometimes they start dancing closely behind you unexpectedly. The guys in Spain don’t necessarily go out to flirt with girls, which especially in Turkey seems more like the case. In Turkey the guys say cheeky things, but in contrast to the American guys, they are careful with touching girls in case she has a boyfriend.
The Turkish girl also told me that the Spanish guys know what no means. I agree with this, but the German girl and I also noticed that when you reject a Spanish boy they don’t feel that offended. They don’t give up, will still try to talk with you and sign at you, whereas Dutch boys would try to avoid you for the rest of the evening. She and I also noticed that Spanish boys are not afraid to compliment you directly. It is normal for them to start the conversation with “Hola guapa!”, which means: hi, beautiful lady.
Safety regarding going to the clubs in Spain is very similar to the Netherlands, Germany and the United states. Whilst travelling to the club in the middle of the night you feel safe when you’re with another friend and it is a very common thing to just spontaneously decide to go out later that night. It doesn’t take that much organization before a group of girls can go into the night, which isn’t the case for Turkish and Peruvian girls.
What all of us have in common: we think that Spanish nightlife start really late. But lucky us, because if you enter clubs before 1 am you can get discounts or you can even enter for free.
Conclusion:
Partying in Spain is the best and there is no need to be afraid as a girl whilst going out in Spain, guys can be stubborn if they want to seduce you, they can be flirty throughout a normal conversation, they can ask you to dance with them and sometimes they also like to look at you when you dance, but they will not likely touch you without your permission. But we are still girls and that is why we should stick together nevertheless which country we are in (especially in bigger cities): we should never party without friends and watch our drinks to make sure nobody puts something in. It is not that this is likely that something bad happens, but better safe than sorry.
By: Evelien Edwards
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