What time is it in Benidorm?

Benidorm is one hour ahead of London, Dublin and Lisbon all year round, because the UK, Ireland and Portugal change their clocks on the same nights as Spain. If it is 20:00 in Manchester or Cork, it is 21:00 on the Levante strip.

Visitors from the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany need to do nothing: Benidorm shares their time exactly. The clock above shows the live time in Benidorm next to London, Amsterdam, Helsinki and New York, so you can check before ringing home or booking a call.

One trap catches island-hoppers: the Canary Islands are one hour behind mainland Spain, on the same time as the UK. A Tenerife holiday last year tells you nothing about Benidorm time.

Spain changes its clocks on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October, at 01:00 GMT, under the EU summer-time directive. In Benidorm that means 02:00 jumps to 03:00 in spring and 03:00 falls back to 02:00 in autumn.

Spain's government proposed ending the twice-yearly change in October 2025, but the EU Council has not agreed a common position, so the changes below still apply. The European Commission has published dates up to 2031.

Spain sits on roughly the same longitude as Britain, and Madrid lies almost directly south of London, yet its clocks match Berlin. Spain kept Greenwich Mean Time from 1901 until 1940, when Franco moved the clocks forward one hour to align with Nazi Germany.

The change was never reversed. A Spanish parliamentary committee proposed returning to GMT in 2013, linking the late clock to Spaniards sleeping less than other Europeans, but no government has acted on it.

The practical effect for visitors is late light. The sun rises and sets later by the clock than you might expect, which is one reason evening life in Benidorm starts late. Our sunrise and sunset times page shows how late the sun goes down each month.

Spanish meal times run later than in northern Europe, and Benidorm's entertainment follows them. Spanish restaurants usually serve lunch from about 13:30 or 14:00 to 15:30 or 16:00, and dinner from about 21:00. British bars and cafés serve food all day, so you can eat at 18:00 if you prefer.

Shows start late too. In the fortnight from 15 October 2026 our listings carried 1,381 shows, and 80% of them started between 20:00 and 01:59, with the busiest start times 21:00 and 22:00. About one in eight started in the afternoon, mostly at beach bars such as the Jolly Roger Beach Bar.

A one-hour shift causes little jet lag, but it does cause missed transfers. Smartphones switch to Spanish time automatically once they connect to a local network; manually set watches, older cameras and car clocks do not.

Every start time on onbenidorm, from tribute acts tonight to the Benidorm Palace programme, is shown in Benidorm time, whatever time zone your phone or laptop is set to. Our listings treat anything before 05:00 as part of the previous night, so a 01:00 Saturday show sits on Friday night's list.

If you are planning from home, add one hour to UK or Irish time to see what is on now, or use what's on this week to plan ahead.