Most Spaniards say they never take a siesta at all
The siesta is Spain's most famous habit, yet in a 2009 survey 58.6% of Spaniards said they never nap, and only 16.2% said they did so daily. Spanish workers are not slacking either: their afternoons often run from 5 pm until 8 or 9 pm, and on average they work hundreds more hours a year than Germans.
The word comes from the Latin hora sexta, the sixth hour counted from dawn, which puts it around noon. Romans called the habit meridiatio, a name that survives in the French méridienne. Roman nobles posted along the Mediterranean took it to escape the midday heat, and Catullus, Caesar and Cicero all mention it. Einhard wrote that Charlemagne, after a summer lunch, would undress completely and rest for two or three hours.
English speakers often mix up the nap with the long Spanish and Portuguese lunch break, which lasts two or three hours. That break grew partly from farm work in the scorching southern summer and partly from the bleak years after the Spanish Civil War, when many city dwellers commuted between part-time jobs. Nearly three in four Spanish nappers say they doze on the sofa rather than in bed, and the daily share fell 7 points between 1998 and 2009.
Midday rest turns up far beyond Spain. About two-thirds of people in China habitually take a noon nap, averaging around 30 minutes. In Muslim countries a short rest called qailulah, between the midday and afternoon prayers, is encouraged and makes it easier to wake before dawn. In seventeenth-century Russia napping after dinner was so expected that one complaint against the ruler known as False Dmitriy was that he skipped it. Communist Yugoslavia, by contrast, set office hours from 7 am to 2 pm to avoid siestas.
Biology helps explain the timing. The pressure to sleep builds from the moment you wake, while the body clock's push for alertness only starts in the late afternoon, leaving a dip in between. The English-speaking world, long dismissive, now rebrands it the power nap, a phrase coined by the Cornell psychologist James Maas.
Source: Siesta
