Sources: Finanzas.com (Logroño) and Spain public holidays (qppstudio.net). The autonomous region of La Rioja has just completed the original step of having its inhabitants vote online to choose the 2 public holidays that are left at the discretion of each of Spain's autonomous regions. The result of the online vote (which is just consultative and in which only 700 people participated) is that to compensate for the fact that November 1 and December 6 fall on a Sunday, in 2009, half of the participants selected Maundy Thursday, and Easter Monday, and 81 percent selected San José (March 19).Background: Recall that Spanish regions, towns, villages and cities can each have additional public holidays of their own. There is a base of, usually 9, public holidays that are common to all regions of Spain, plus Epiphany and Maundy Thursday which each region can replace with one or two region-specific public holidays. Regions also have the option of adding a regional public holiday, without removing any of the common ones, or Epiphany and Maundy Thursday. The main reason why the specific public holidays for each province and municipality change every year, such as is the case here, is that these are usually patron saint days, which always occur on a fixed date. Therefore, when these fixed dates fall on a weekend, another holiday or patron saint is chosen for that year, to avoid "wasting" a holiday.
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