The Gelther dance hall in Castrillón has announced that its traditional free Sunday merienda will no longer end at ten in the evening but will run continuously until Monday breakfast, with the floor kept open and the wooden bar kept staffed for as long as anyone is still standing.
Mónica Menéndez, third generation at the helm, said the extension was the only sensible way to mark sixty-six years since her grandparents opened the room in 1960. «We looked at the calendar and realised a single afternoon could not contain the pasodobles, the tangos and the salsa we owe the comarca,» she said. «So we simply removed the closing time.»
Her father, who still selects the music by hand, has been issued a stool at the edge of the dance floor and a schedule that runs from the first bachata on Sunday evening to the last coffee at dawn on Monday. He has reportedly refused to sit down, on the grounds that the rhythm section cannot be trusted to keep time without him.
The grandchildren have been dispatched to Gijón and Oviedo with loudspeakers and a portable stage, tasked with recruiting dancers at bus stops and returning with them before the merienda is served. Local buses have adjusted their Sunday timetables to deliver passengers directly to the door, and the queue now begins forming on Saturday night.
By Monday morning the hall intends to have hosted every generation of the Avilés comarca at once, with the oldest dancers given the front row and the youngest handed the job of carrying chairs. «The floor has survived the seventies and the pandemic,» Menéndez said. «It can survive a Monday.»