Last week saw a widely spread false story that daylight saving time will
be canceled in Spain and in the Canary Islands, starting in the year
2026. The story was reported as fact in the Daily Mirror[1], which
evidently got it from the Canarian Weekly[2]. Both stories said that the
last clock change would be this month (implying permanent daylight
saving time), that the change would officially take place in 2026
(contradicting the last-clock-change assertion), and that this had been
confirmed by the Official State Gazette (BOE), i.e., Spain's Boletín
Oficial del Estado.
As Gazette Life noted Thursday[3], the story is false. There is no
change to Spain's timekeeping plans.
I guess the bogus story is based on a misreading of Order PCM/186/2022
dated 2022-03-11[4], which listed DST transitions for 2022 through 2026.
A copy of this old order was recently marked as updated by BOE (I don't
know why), and my guess is that the "new" order popped up on some
reporter's AI, which generated the hallucination that Spain was
discontinuing DST.
This reminds me of the 2023 false story about Greenland abolishing DST
that was first published, as far as I can determine[5], by Bloomberg's
Lebawit Lily Girma. Although I had an email correspondence about that
bogus story with two Bloomberg editors, the bogus story was never
corrected or retracted. I expect the same thing would happen with the
Daily Mail and the Canarian Weekly, so I am not bothering to write them.
We can expect more of these falsehoods in the era of generative AI,
which makes it easier to write bogus stories that superficially look
authentic. I am seeing considerably more use of generative AI even in
scholarly papers on the subject.
[1]: Bautista A. Huge EU country loved by Brits will stop changing
clocks in 2026. The Mirror. 2025-03-11.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/travel/huge-eu-country-loved-brits-34832825
[2]: The Canary Islands are set to abandon clock changes from 2026.
Canarian Weekly. 2025-03-09.
https://www.canarianweekly.com/posts/The-Canary-Islands-are-set-to-abandon-clock-changes-from-2026
[3]: No change on clocks for Spain and Canaries. Gazette Life.
2025-03-13.
https://gazettelife.com/news/no-change-on-clocks-for-spain-and-canaries/
[4]: Orden PCM/186/2022, de 11 de marzo, por la que se publica el
calendario del período de la hora de verano correspondiente a los años
2022 a 2026. https://www.boe.es/eli/es/o/2022/03/11/pcm186
[5]: Eggert P. Did Greenland abolish daylight saving from 2024 on?
https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2023-April/032870.html
