San Francisco Frontiers - 'Impossible to sleep': noise disputes rile fun-loving Spain

"The only thing that makes us different from other countries is that we are noisier," Spanish writer Ignacio Peyro wrote recently in daily newspaper El Pais.

"We have as many words for party... as the Inuit for snow," he quipped.

When foreigners enter a crowded Spanish bar for the first time, they often mistake the deafening hubbub for a fight.

The cities sound even louder in the summer as the heat pushes revellers into the street in bar terraces, patron saint festivals and Pride marches with their accompanying loudspeakers and fireworks.

In historic neighbourhoods of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, where many homes lack air conditioning and opening the windows is essential to cool down, getting a decent night's sleep is mission impossible.

An exasperated Toni Fernandez, who has been living opposite a bar in Madrid's party-prone Chueca for 15 years, knows that all too well.

"If you sleep light, it's impossible," the 58-year-old hairdresser told AFP, saying he dreamed of moving "when I can, which will be soon".

"The Portuguese have a different culture of speaking much more softly. I myself realise I speak loudly" when in Spain's Iberian neighbour, said Fernandez.

For Yomara Garcia, a lawyer who is president of the association Jurists Against Noise, those who speak out against the cacophony are labelled "whingers, anti-social, hypersensitive".

"The right to personal privacy, the inviolability of the home, commonly called the right to rest... is a right that takes precedence" over "the misnomer right to leisure", said Garcia.

The latter "is not a fundamental right", she told AFP at an acoustics congress in the Mediterranean city of Malaga, a tourist hotspot often painted red by boisterous partygoers.

- 'This is Spain' -

Legal action over the racket now extends well beyond bars and has seen anti-noise associations sprout across the country.

Concerts at Real Madrid's Bernabeu stadium have been suspended after residents' complaints, while courts dedicated to the popular racquet sport of padel and patron saint festivals also attract ire.

The complaints have even targeted school playgrounds in Barcelona, prompting the regional parliament of Catalonia to declare them exempt from noise regulations.

Madrid's Silence Centre, run by the Dominican Catholic order, offers an oasis of tranquility to around 50 weekly users in the hustle and bustle of the Spanish capital.

The place was an oddity when it opened in 2011, but now "there is a huge supply of spaces for a retreat, silence, meditation," its director Elena Hernandez Martin told AFP.

Ana Cristina Ripoll, a philosophy teacher who finds refuge in the centre, believes the attitude towards noise in Spain has changed little.

"I don't think there's any awareness," said Ripoll, 59, recalling how some metro users "got angry" when she asked them to turn down the music blaring from their mobile phone.

"There are even people who tell you: 'This is Spain'," she said.

D.Robinson--SFF