The spanish public have already been shown to be massively in favor of staying on UTC+2 year-round, though this would mean that the sun wouldn't rise till 0930 in the depths of Winter.
I think once the government actually stops and takes a look at the repercussions of all options we will end up carrying on with the status quo.
If you want the sun to be at its high point at noon, Spain is obviously in the wrong time zone. But you see plenty of countries around the world choosing a slightly different timezone to facilitate trade and communication with some other country (or within itself, in the case of larger countries). With most other barriers to trade gone within the eurozone having to convert timezones is a significant inconvinience that (in the mind of many) outweighs having the sun in slightly the wrong place.
Perhaps that has value in an agricultural society, but in today's world I'd much rather have more daylight in my leisure hours (evening) than my working hours.
That has value in any society that values precise measurements of physical observations.
A purposefully inaccurate time zone is the equivalent of changing the length of the meter to make your daily commute less distance in the winter and more distance in the summer, or to make the meterstick longer all year just so you don't have to drive as many meters every day. It's ridiculous for distance, so why do we do it with time?
Business hours are almost entirely arbitrary anyway. Change them instead.
Changing an offset isn't quite the same thing as changing the measure of a unit. Seconds, minutes and hours are not being adjusted as part of this. It would be more like starting to count from 1 metre instead of 0 metres to adjust the length of your commute.
> Business hours are almost entirely arbitrary anyway. Change them instead.
As it happens, a sibling comment has already pointed out that people have effectively done this. The time of day you eat lunch is arbitrary. So the lunch hour in Spain is 14:00 instead of 13:00, effectively resolving the 'wrong hour' issue.
Fair enough. I was (of course?) using the term to mean 12:00pm which I think is what most people think of when thinking of 'noon'.
Most people have approximately zero reasons to care about when the sun is at it's peak in the sky. Valuing precise measurements of physical observations doesn't make any difference to that in any way I'm aware of.
The sunrise and sunset times have much larger implications on our activities, so why not optimise for those times? I get that any solution won't be optimal for everyone, but it's reasonable to try to optimise for the majority of people where you can.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm
Nothing wrong with wanting sunlight during after-work activities, but are there biological consequences to all of this clock fiddling? (Not arguing for/against, just spit-balling a hypothesis.)
Offhand, I can't think of any biological significance to noon. Noon's charms for timekeeping are technological.
1. It is easy for everyone in a given area to agree on noon. It happens with the Sun high in the sky, as opposed to sunrise which is obscured for many be trees, hills, and buildings.
2. The interval from noon to the next noon is constant [1]. The sunrise to sunrise interval varies considerably. Make a good mechanical clock and sync it to noon, and it can run a long time without getting too far out of sync. With time based on sunrise, you'd need to adjust the clock everyday, or make the clock more complicated to have it know about the variation.
[1] well...maybe not to people with very precise clocks, but it is constant as far as the needs of most people most of the time goes.