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You are here: Home Life in Lifestyle El botellón, binge-drinking Spanish style

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14/03/2008El botellón, binge-drinking Spanish style

El botellón, binge-drinking Spanish style It’s that time of year of year again, when hordes of Spanish teenagers descend upon the streets to get collectively sloshed until dawn the next day. Rachael Loxston reports.

It’s that time of year of year again, when hordes of Spanish teenagers descend upon the streets to get collectively sloshed until dawn the next day.

El botellón, which literally means the ‘big bottle,’ has become a regular feature of towns and cities across Spain since the nineties. Naturally, this has invited concerns from social commentators, politicians, healthcare professionals and disgruntled local residents. The UK does not have the monopoly on teenage binge-drinking.
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Right wing Opposition leader, Mariano Rajoy has repeatedly expressed his concern and the Socialist Party Health Minister Elena Salgado has repeatedly called on parents to keep the under 18s away and states, “The number of hospitalisations from alcohol abuse has doubled in a decade.”

But surely it’s just a harmless bit of fun for the kids, most who are usually celebrating the end of their university term exams, with others tagging along for the ride, (children as young as 14 are often admitted.) The appeal is obvious, it is organised by the kids for the kids who want to bring the bar outside onto the warm balmy spring evenings.

The main aim for all concerned is to make their gathering the biggest and the best. In Seville 2006, 5,000 youngsters gathered beckoned by modern technological devices such as the Internet and mobile phone messaging. Neighbouring cities challenge each other as to who can attract most people, but quite how that will be judged is anyone’s guess. Social networking internet sites such as MySpace and Kelmoo are heaving with footage posted of grinning Spanish teenagers holding aloft plastic cups of cocktails of calimococho, a popular brew of wine and cola.

One 17-year-old girl in Madrid said, “One drink in a bar costs 3 euros. I can drink on this amount all night.”

Her friends when asked how they spend every weekend, shout in unison “Drinking!”

 Most of these gatherings are against local by-laws, but like so many rules and regulations are hardly ever enforced. This has led to calls from regional and central government for tighter controls on drinking in the street as a way of stopping the phenomenon.

In Seville this year, however, the social phenomenon of el botellón is to be virtually eradicated in the historic centre of Seville thanks to the introduction of regulations prohibiting the public consumption of alcohol. According to the latest data available from the Councillorship of Co-existence and Security in the City, young people are "moving" this practice to the nearby neighbourhoods of Triana and Los Remedios to outsmart this new rule.

Councillor Nieves Hernandez, explained that an Antibotellón Act made in 2006 now prohibits such “leisure activities” in public spaces due to a total of 164 complaints made by neighbours and 92 interventions carried out by the Local Police. The hordes will stay drinking until dawn, but local residents in Barcelona complained bitterly when the day after the streets were littered with hundreds of empty bottles, food wrappers, vomit and urine.

Elsewhere in Spain, it seems that what has been by and large a peaceable and quirky affair has also been recently criticised. On the 29 June 2006, six Spanish Civil Guards (the government police force) were beaten up, two seriously, by a drunken mob of youngsters who had turned on them when they tried to stop an early morning teenage brawl. This did not occur in Madrid or Barcelona, or any of the other major Spanish cities, but in a small village called Ponte do Porto near Ferrol, the birthplace of the late General Franco.

And then there is the massive clear-up campaign on the morning after and the not- so –small matter of youngsters being admitted to hospital emergency departments due to alcohol poisoning. The police get the brunt of booze fuelled violence and hospitals are witnessing scores of youngster suffering from alcohol poisoning. Plus, social commentators are concerned about the implications of binge drinking on health, the increased likelihood of teenage libidos and a dropped guard leading to teenage pregnancies, and the common practice of combining alcohol with other drugs, such as cannabis and cocaine.

So what is the future of el botellón? Who knows, but one thing for sure this Spanish phenomenon is picking up momentum elsewhere. In London this year, Spanish language students are organising a Midsummer’s Day botellón via emails and texts. Now that would be interesting to watch.

Rachael Loxston / Expatica


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