How La Línea talks, shops and queues: a newcomer’s guide

The first thing I learned about living in La Línea is that everything here runs on talking. Not on speed, not on efficiency, on talking. I call it the priority of talking, and once you see it you stop being annoyed by it.

Here is what that looks like in a shop, in a queue and at a bar, for anyone who has just arrived.

On this page:
Your Duolingo Spanish meets Andalusia ·
The counter is not a conveyor belt ·
Opening hours and late dinners ·
Queues, and the word perdona ·
Tipping ·
Sources

Your Duolingo Spanish meets Andalusia

Almost everyone who arrives here, English speakers, Romanians, everybody, starts with Duolingo. You know how it is: it keeps telling you that you did better, and after a month you are sure you speak Spanish. You walk into a shop with your sentence ready in your head, something like por favor, dame dos kilos de patatas, and you say it.

Rarely does it go like that. The seller looks at you and says “¿Qué?”, and you say “ah, whatever” and point at the potatoes.

It is not your fault. Andalusian Spanish is fast, and words lose their endings. Someone at home told me that Pall Mall cigarettes sound like pa mal here, which is para el mal, “for the bad one”, said at full speed. If you do not know it is coming, you will never hear Pall Mall in it.

The fix is not another lesson. It is saying the sentence anyway, out loud, to a real person. If you are lucky, someone close to you corrects your grammar. I mix up articles and plurals all the time. I have noticed something about correction, though: if I did not understand a thing the first time, hearing it a second time in the same words does not help.

The counter is not a conveyor belt

I have never had a bad experience in a Spanish pharmacy. What I have had is patience training. People here take their time with every customer, and that includes you. The meat counter in a supermarket can easily be a twenty-minute conversation, and the person ahead of you is not wasting your time. They are doing what the counter is for.

If you are in a rush, you will have to unrush yourself. Arrive with a little extra time, say hola, smile and wait your turn. When it is your turn, you will be given the same patience.

Opening hours and late dinners

The official Andalusian tourism site gives ordinary business hours as 10:00 to 14:00 in the morning and 17:00 to 20:00 or 21:00 in the afternoon. The Spanish national tourism site says shops are generally open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 21:00, but that many close between 14:00 and 17:00, especially in summer. Large department stores keep uninterrupted hours instead.

In practice this means you should not plan a shopping trip for the middle of the afternoon without checking. The hours of a particular shop are best checked on its door or website; supermarkets in town vary.

Meals are late by British standards too. The same official source says lunch in restaurants is served between 13:00 and 15:30 and dinner from 20:30 to 23:00. If you arrive at a restaurant at 18:30 hoping for dinner, you will probably find the kitchen still asleep.

Queues, and the word perdona

The queue at the Gibraltar frontier used to be a small lesson in itself. There was a mix of workers, always in a rush, and some of them skipped the queue. That was legitimate: they held Spanish ID and could use the machines, while visitors who needed their passports checked had to wait at the officer. You could see it on people’s faces. English people looked strangely at the ones passing them, and workers without the right papers stayed in the queue and got a little annoyed.

The first time I was rushing somewhere, I no longer remember where, and I found a group of people standing in my way. Instead of saying perdona, I simply pushed through. The whole group stopped talking, turned and looked at me as if I was very rude. They moved. I was probably the subject of conversation for the rest of the afternoon.

Say perdona. It costs nothing, and it is the difference between being a person and being a problem. If you try to ask someone to go faster, even politely, they may speed up a little, but they will probably look at you as if you were rude. It does not usually work.

Tipping

Tipping is not mandatory in Spain, and people who come from England are often surprised to hear it is worth doing at all. You can live here without tipping and nobody will say anything. But it is not polite to skip it, and it is noticed.

Even five cents left on the table means something to the person who serves you. It shows that you saw them. A bigger tip makes them happier, of course, but the gesture is what counts.

If you are still working on your Spanish, there is a related article on Llanito, the English-Spanish mix you hear across the frontier, which explains why the language you hear here and in Gibraltar does not always match the one in the app.

Sources

• Junta de Andalucía, Andalucía tourism, “Schedules” (business hours, department stores, restaurant lunch and dinner times).
• Spain.info, Spain’s official tourism website, “About Spain” (general shop opening hours and the afternoon closure).