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Spain's youth go on major booze-up

Spain was on Friday bracing for its biggest ever outdoor drinking party, with tens of thousands of young people expected to show up nationwide to guzzle hard liquor, wine and beer overnight.

Thousands of police were preparing for the event known as macro-botellon, which had been arranged anonymously through cell phone and internet messages with some 20 cities vying for which one would draw the largest number of people to get drunk at squares or parks.

The event was based on a practice known as botellon (from the word botella meaning bottle), which has evolved in Spain over the past decade.

It basically consists of youths, mainly between 15 and 24 years of age, gathering outdoors to drink together.

They often make so much noise it keeps locals from sleeping at night and leave behind a mess of garbage, vomit pools, glass shards and graffiti.

The disturbance has prompted some cities, such as Madrid and Barcelona, to prohibit such drinking outdoors and to impose fines of up to 30,000 euros (US$36,500) on those who break the rule.

Yet the threat of police repression did not impress the anonymous people who launched the call for the macro-botellon in the southern city of Granada in an attempt to outdo Seville, where a street bash of more than 3,000 youngsters made national headlines a month ago.

The party call quickly spread to other cities, alarming Spanish Health Minister Elena Salgado who called it an "attack against health" and urged parents to keep under-age teenagers from attending such events on Friday night.

The young practitioners of the botellon say they drink out of doors simply because it is too expensive to do so in bars or discotheques.

Analysts say the botellon also reflects a certain change in drinking habits in Spain, where people traditionally sipped wine with meals while youths are now turning to Nordic-style heavy drinking.

Studies show that 38 percent of people aged between 14 and 18 years drink alcohol regularly in Spain. Girls drink as much as boys, and the number of youngsters drinking is on the increase.

More than just an expression of teenage rebelliousness, the botellon has also been described as a deeper symptom of ill-ease in a consumerist culture where young people are expected to spend money on concerts, movies and other forms of leisure.

Some say massive drinking is a form of protest typical of a permissively raised generation looking for "easy and cheap transgression," in the words of Antoni Gual, a Barcelona physician specialized in health troubles caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
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