Dates, Days & Months

Other expressions

día laboral – working day

día festivo – bank holiday/public holiday

puente – an extra day off that bridges the gap between a public holiday and the weekend

quince días/una quincena – fortnight

How to write dates in Spanish

Spanish expresses the date with cardinal numbers, although certain countries in Latin America use ordinal numbers to refer to the first three days of the month.

Examples:

1st March = el uno de marzo (Spain)

1st March = el primero de marzo (Latin America)

• The order of the date is always as follows: day, month, year. Like in English, the day and the year are written as numbers.

Example:

lunes, 1 de marzo de 2001

• We place the preposition de before the month and the year.

Example:

5 de octubre de 2005

• When we refer to a specific date within a sentence, we introduce it with el. This is similar to the English the.

Examples:

Nos vamos de vacaciones el 10 de agosto.We’re going on holiday on (the) 10th (of) August.

Nos vamos de vacaciones el sábado 10 de agosto.We’re going on holiday on Saturday 10th August.

• To just say the day, we don’t use the article.

Example:

Hoy es 7 de octubre.Today is the 7th October.

not: Hoy es el 7 de octubre.

• To write the date as a number, we can use dashes (-) or slashes (/).

Examples:

15-06-2018

15/06/2018

• Like in English, we can also abbreviate the year to the final two digits when writing the date as a number.

Example:

15-06-18

Public Holidays in Spain and Latin America

The table below presents some of the most important public holidays (días festivos) in Spain and Latin America:

How to say years in Spanish

To say years (los años) in Spanish we use cardinal numbers.

Examples:

1813 – mil ochocientos trece

1999 – mil novecientos noventa y nueve

2000 – dos mil

2010 – dos mil diez