How not to Be an A**hole in Spain

So you want to greet a Spaniard (Siesta for Beginners #1)

Welcome to Siesta for Beginners: the insider’s guide to the Spanish way of life!
If you’ve ever wondered how we manage to have dinner at 10 p.m. without developing collective nighttime heartburn, or why we serve tiny plates of food no one ordered, I’m here to guide you through my sometimes bizarre, but mostly lovely, native culture.

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A few months ago, my doctor tried to kiss me.

We shook hands at the start, but after a long consultation that delved into some personal topics, he (mid-thirties, six-foot-two) stared into my eyes and leaned in.

He was tall, dark, handsome, and Italian. For a moment, I hesitated. I’m a married woman—should I give in to the temptation? Steamy scenes from Grey’s Anatomy began playing in my head.

Then I remembered—we were in Madrid, Spain. After five years of living abroad, I sometimes forget the customary greeting and how to use it properly.

See, the handshake at the start had been the right call. Formal context, hygiene, etc. But by the end, we had been talking about life, family, and travel. He had come into intimate contact with my body. His nurse was about to give me an eye-watering quote for an elective procedure.

The familiarity had developed, and now, the official Spanish Two-Kiss Greeting was in order.

The Spanish Two-Kiss Greeting (TKG): Standard Procedure

To perform the TKG, you brush your right cheek against the other person’s right cheek and kiss the air.

You don’t actually kiss the cheek because it’s anatomically impossible for both pairs of lips to touch each other’s skin at the same time.

Seriously—give it a try. It’s like attempting to kiss your elbow.

The movement is brisk and decisive. Since we do this with pretty much everyone, all the time, we’ve become desensitized. My doctor’s situation wasn’t an emotionally charged, vulnerable moment—just a signal of increased familiarity, without me needing to consider carrying his babies¹.

Where and When to Perform the TKG

The TKG is the standard greeting in informal situations.² A few examples:

• If you’re introduced to someone in an informal setting—say, a party—you kiss. Yep, right away and without warning, you're launching your face against a stranger's skin. Gotta love Spain.

• If you arrive at a gathering with fewer than fifteen people, you kiss everyone—same when you leave. Spaniards are not lazy—we’re just tired of kissing each other.

• If you arrive at a big party, you only kiss the first few people you run into. But don’t think you’ve escaped the lip workout! You’ll still need to kiss everyone new you start talking to, even if you already know them..

• When you leave the party, you may kiss everyone close to you and wave at the rest, but only if it’s a big party. If there are fewer than fifteen people, kiss everyone or risk looking like an asshole (details below).

• If you run into someone you know—friend, family member, colleague—you kiss them, even if it’s a work colleague you’ve never kissed before.

• If you run into someone you know and that person is in their workplace, you still kiss them! You have not visited Spain if you haven’t waited in line for your butcher/hairdresser/shop clerk to finish effusively greeting someone and updating them on the last weeks or months of their lives.

The rules shift for men and women, depending on context:

Are you a woman? In informal contexts, women TKG both men and women.

Are you a man? In informal contexts, you TKG women and handshake-and-awkwardly-pat the back of other men, unless those men are family—then you kiss them and feel like you’re in the Mafia.³

What About Formal Contexts?

As I said, Spain is mostly informal, but we do shake hands in business settings. I think. I’ve never been in a business setting in Spain, so I’ll need my fellow Spanish readers to chime in.

When I worked in public healthcare during my psychology internship, I’d kiss my colleagues the first time I met them, and then never again until I left for good.⁴

Don’t Do This! TKG Social Faux Pas

• Don’t just offer your face without making the kissing sound. It looks standoffish and rude. Just imagine if the other person did the same. How awkward would that be? VERY awkward. Please don’t.

• Don’t offer your hand if a Spaniard leans in to kiss you. I mean, you do you, and don’t enter into any interaction that makes you uncomfortable. But you’ll contribute to cementing the image of aloof, cold guiris (foreigners) and make the other person feel uncomfortable for something that, to us, is as intimate as a high-five.

• Don’t leave a gathering of fewer than fifteen people without doing la ronda (the round) of TKG. You can get away with no kissing if there are more people and/or you provide an excuse, a few air kisses, and a sentence like daos todos por besados (“consider yourselves kissed”). Otherwise, people will murmur behind you: Is she okay? Is she mad at us?

• Don’t start with the wrong cheek! Italians kiss the left cheek first, but Spaniards always start with the right. Avoid weird pecks and painful nose bumps.

• Don’t stress too much. We know you’re a guiri and we will forgive everything because our GDP depends on it we’re warm and easygoing people. Even the weirdest situation can be defused with a joke and a couple of cervecitas (beer).

That’s it, my dear lector (reader). If you travel to Spain, warm up your facial muscles, get yourself a family-sized jar of Chapstick, and enjoy the subtle contact with the olive skin of sexy strangers!

P.S. Spain is a very heterogeneous country, and I’m speaking as an Andalusian who has lived in Madrid and Barcelona. Double-check with a local if you are traveling to other parts of the country, especially the north (Basque Country, Galicia), since they don’t get as much sun as we do and are often not in the mood to go around kissing everyone.

1. I kinda totally would. Not the actual babies, you know—just the part where you make them.

2. Which, in Spain, means pretty much all of them.

3. I’m not a man, so this is an educated guess.

4. Unless, of course, we met in an informal situation—then we’d kiss each other, even if that informal situation was bumping into each other two hours after leaving work.