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

14/03/2008El 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.”

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