Public holidays, and when things actually shut

The options around public holidays are set out side by side below, with the conditions that genuinely favour one over the other.

Two layers of calendar

There is a set of national public holidays and, separately, a municipal holiday specific to each town or city. That means a business can be closed in one municipality and open twenty minutes away on the same day.

Municipal holidays are set locally and are easy to miss when planning from abroad. Checking both layers for the specific place you are going is the only reliable approach.

Fixed and moveable dates

Several holidays are on fixed calendar dates and others follow the religious calendar and move each year. The moveable ones cluster in spring and shift the shape of that part of the year. Dates change annually, so use an official current calendar rather than any list you have seen before.

Holidays falling near a weekend often generate long weekends with heavy travel.

What closes and what does not

Public offices, banks and most administrative services close on both national and municipal holidays. Large shops and shopping centres often open; small independent shops often do not. Restaurants, cafés and transport generally run, sometimes on reduced timetables.

Where it helps most, museums and monuments vary, and several close on a fixed weekday regardless of holidays.

The summer shutdown

A great many small family businesses close for two or three weeks in August, which is not a holiday but behaves like one. Notices go up on the door shortly before, which is the only warning you will get. The city fills with visitors and empties of residents at exactly the same time.

Anything you depend on locally is worth checking before mid-August.

Local festivities

Neighbourhood festivities in early summer transform particular streets with music, grilled food and very large crowds. They are organised locally, dates vary by year and by neighbourhood, and programmes are published close to the time. They are genuinely local rather than staged for visitors, which is both their appeal and the reason to behave accordingly.

Residential streets during these nights are extremely loud, which is worth knowing if you are staying in one.

Planning around all of it

Anything administrative should assume closures and appointment backlogs around holiday periods. Anything social should assume the opposite: holidays are when squares, beaches and parks are busiest. Transport on the days either side of a long weekend is heavily booked toward the coast and the countryside.

A quick check of the current official calendar for the specific municipality takes two minutes and prevents a wasted day.

If that does not fit your week, it is not a failure of willpower.

The bridge between a holiday and a weekend

When a holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday a great many people take the day in between as leave, and offices, schools and small businesses thin out accordingly across the whole stretch. That practice carries no legal status and is not observed uniformly, which is exactly what makes it awkward, because some places are shut and others are open with half a staff and no explanation. The travel effect is larger than the holiday itself, with trains and coastal roads busy over four days instead of two and accommodation priced for the whole run.

For anything administrative the safe assumption is that the entire period is unproductive, and for anything social it is one of the better weeks of the year to be in a small town.

Side by side

The takeaway

Check the national calendar, then the municipal one, then whether the specific place shuts in August.

Pick the one that costs you least, and let the rest wait.