Happy New Year in Spanish: Feliz Año Nuevo

Happy New Year in Spanish is ¡Feliz año nuevo!, said "feh-LEES AH-nyo NWEH-bo", and the everyday short form, the one people call out at midnight, is ¡Feliz año! Feliz is "happy", año is "year" and nuevo is "new". Below are the other ways to say it, New Year wishes in Spanish to copy for family, friends and work, what happens at midnight in Madrid and across Latin America, the words of New Year’s Eve and 1 January, and how often Spanish film and television subtitles say them.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 15 min read

How to say Happy New Year in Spanish

Feliz año and próspero año nuevo are both recorded as standard phrases meaning "happy New Year". Wiktionary’s English page labels próspero año nuevo as Spain and feliz año nuevo as Latin America, but its own entry for próspero año nuevo gives no region at all. ¡Feliz año! is what a Colombian family says to each other at midnight before going out to greet the neighbours.

Que tengas works the way que pases una feliz Navidad does: que with the subjunctive makes a wish, and the verb changes with the person. The full pattern, with vosotros and ustedes, is in Merry Christmas in Spanish.

Capital letters, in one line: the Spanish dictionary writes Año Nuevo with capitals when it means the day, 1 January, and año nuevo in lower case when it means the year that is starting, which is why a wish is normally ¡feliz año nuevo! inside a sentence. The Christmas page has the rest of the rules.

Feliz año nuevo, word by word

• Feliz is "happy", from Latin felix, the same word as in feliz Navidad and feliz cumpleaños. In most of Spain the z is said like the th of "thin"; in Latin America it is an s.
• Año is "year", from Latin annus. The dictionary’s second sense is the one that ends at midnight on 31 December: the twelve months from 1 January to 31 December.
• Nuevo is "new". It comes after the noun, as most Spanish adjectives do: año nuevo. Feliz comes first, exactly as in feliz Navidad.

Saying it: feh-LEES AH-nyo NWEH-bo, stressed on -LEES, AH- and NWEH-.

• The ñ of año is the ny of "canyon": IPA [ɲ]. It is one sound, not an n followed by a y.
• The ue of nuevo is a single syllable, "nweh".
• The v of nuevo is a soft b, made with the lips nearly closed, as in Navidad.

Año, not ano

The little wave over the n is not decoration. Año is "year"; ano, without it, is the anatomical word for "anus". Wiktionary’s entries for both carry the same warning: do not confuse them. So tengo veinte años is "I am twenty", and the same sentence without the tilde is something else entirely.

If a keyboard has no ñ, it is worth finding one: on a phone, hold down the n; on most computers a Spanish keyboard layout puts it next to the L. Without it, Feliz ano nuevo in a card wishes the reader something nobody intended.

New Year wishes in Spanish, ready to copy

Spanish has a familiar "you", tú, and a formal one, usted; the plurals are vosotros (informal, most of Spain) and ustedes (everywhere else, and formal in Spain). Pick the wish that fits the person.

For family

For friends

For work, with usted and ustedes

El año que viene is "next year", literally "the year that is coming". Brindo por ti uses brindar por, "to toast", and gives the noun el brindis, "the toast".

At midnight

• ¡Feliz año!: the greeting at midnight, to family first and then to the neighbours.
• ¡Salud!: "cheers", the ordinary toast with a glass in hand.
• ¡Un año más!: "one more year!", which Madrid families were already shouting together at midnight in 1894, according to a newspaper report of that New Year.

Midnight in Spain: las campanadas and the twelve grapes

In Spain the year ends with las campanadas, the twelve strokes of midnight, and las doce uvas, a grape swallowed on each stroke. The clock everyone watches is the one on the Real Casa de Correos in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, the Reloj de Gobernación, inaugurated in 1866. People crowd into the square below it, and the rest of the country follows it on television: Televisión Española first broadcast the chimes in 1962, and every major channel now shows them.

Three things to know before trying it:

• Los cuartos come first. Before the twelve strokes, the clock plays the four quarter-hour chimes, pairs of strokes a second apart. They are not the hour, and you do not eat on them. The hour strokes that follow are three seconds apart. A ball on top of the clock drops about half a minute before midnight as a warning.
• Mistaking them is a national memory. On New Year’s Eve 1989 a Televisión Española presenter announced the hour strokes as the quarters, and much of Spain missed its grapes. It was in every paper the next day.
• The Canary Islands do it an hour later, because they are an hour behind, and since the turn of 1983 to 1984 national television has shown their midnight too.

The twelve are usually explained as one grape for each month of the coming year, though nobody is quite sure whether the twelve stand for the months or for the strokes. In Spain they are fresh, usually green grapes; since the early 2000s they have also been sold in small tubs, peeled and seedless.

Where the grapes came from: two stories

Two explanations are told, and they do not agree.

• The 1909 harvest. The best-known story is that grape growers in the province of Alicante, with a large surplus after an excellent harvest in 1909, popularised the custom to sell their grapes. English and Spanish Wikipedia both give this, citing Dorothy Spicer’s Festivals of Western Europe and National Geographic.
• A Madrid joke from the 1880s. The other story starts in December 1882, when Madrid’s mayor, José Abascal, put a charge of one duro on people going out at night to "meet the Three Kings", a rowdy street custom. Well-off families were meanwhile eating grapes with champagne at their New Year’s Eve dinner, a habit said to have come from France, and a group of madrileños went to the Puerta del Sol to eat grapes on the chimes, in mockery of it. This version is widely repeated, but the sources Wikipedia gives for it are recent web pages, not documents from the 1880s.

What settles part of the argument is the newspapers. On 2 January 1894 El Siglo Futuro reprinted an article from El Imparcial calling grapes at midnight a custom "imported from France" that had become naturalised in Spain, and El Correo Militar described families eating their grapes at the first stroke of twelve and shouting ¡Un año más!. On 1 January 1896 La Correspondencia de España reported that the ministers had greeted the new year at midnight "eating fine grapes". So the custom existed in Madrid at least fifteen years before 1909. The Alicante harvest may well have spread it across Spain, but it cannot have invented it.

Midnight in Latin America

The grapes have travelled: they are eaten in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile and the Philippines, among others. Around them, each country adds its own rituals for luck: cábalas in Chile, agüeros in Colombia, agüizotes in Costa Rica. These are the ones the sources describe, with the countries they name:

The año viejo is a dummy made of old clothes stuffed with paper or sawdust, often packed with fireworks, and frequently dressed as a politician or a celebrity from the year just gone. Before it burns, someone may read out its testamento, its "will", a satirical review of the year; men dressed as its grieving viudas, "widows", go round asking for coins. ABC News also lists Paraguay and Colombia, though it calls the figure Año Nuevo.

The sources disagree on what the colours mean. The Chilean site This is Chile says yellow underwear brings energy, abundance and prosperity, and love for those who are single; Spanish Wikipedia’s account of Mexico has yellow for money and red or pink for love. In Chile the suitcase walk has variants too: some walk round the block, some stand on a table holding the case, some just stand in the doorway with it. A 2017 survey of 1,236 Costa Ricans found 74.4% had heard of the suitcase walk and 87% of the grapes, though only 42.3% actually ate them, and more than half thought these customs were fading.

The countdown

Where people count down to midnight rather than wait for the chimes, the countdown is la cuenta regresiva in Latin America and la cuenta atrás in Spain; in Chile families follow it on television or the radio. From ten it runs diez, nueve, ocho, siete, seis, cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno. The numbers themselves, with the accents to watch, are in numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish.

The words of New Year

Two of these have regional rivals.

• The hangover is resaca everywhere, but Mexico says la cruda, Colombia el guayabo, Ecuador el chuchaqui, Venezuela el ratón, Central America la goma and Chile la caña.
• Resolutions are propósitos in Wiktionary’s translation, while the Spanish Wikipedia article is titled resolución de Año Nuevo, closer to the English. Both are understood; the counts below show which one subtitles prefer.

La cuesta de enero names the rise in regulated prices, transport, post and energy among them, that arrives each January just after the spending of the holidays. It is used in Spain and in Spanish-speaking America; Mexican papers such as Excélsior explain it too.

How often do Spanish films say them?

We counted the words of New Year in Spanish film and television subtitles, about 423 million words of dialogue. Nochevieja and uvas are the same figures as on the Christmas page.

Each figure is how many times the word is said per million words. They are single words, so each count takes in everything else the word means, which is what the last column is for.

What the counts do show:

• Año, not ano, by a long way. Año is said 304.5 times per million words, and años 965.2. For every 72 año the subtitles have one ano, and that one is a mix of the anatomical word and año typed without its tilde; nothing in a count can separate the two.
• Propósitos beats resoluciones. The plural propósitos is said 6.9 times as often as resoluciones. Both words have other meanings, purposes in one case and court or United Nations resolutions in the other, so this is a lean, not a verdict.
• Champán is the commoner spelling. Wiktionary lists champaña as another form of the same word, and subtitles say champán 2.2 times for every champaña.
• Resaca is the hangover subtitles use. It is said 2.0 times as often as cruda, even though the count for cruda is swollen by every raw thing in the dialogue. The Colombian guayabo appears fewer than ten times in the whole collection, and Ecuador’s chuchaqui not once.
• Midnight is not only New Year’s. Medianoche is said 18 times as often as Nochevieja, because every midnight in every film counts.

Two cautions. Most of these subtitles are translations of English-language films and series, so this is largely what translators chose, not how families in Madrid or Bogotá talk; that alone may explain why the Latin American hangover words barely register. And the collection mixes subtitles from Spain and Latin America without saying which is which.

Learn the language behind the greeting

A greeting is the first sentence of a language. Verbavia teaches Spanish from the most common words up, a lesson a day, free on the web.

The Christmas half of the season, with card wishes, Nochebuena and the Three Kings, is in Merry Christmas in Spanish, and the same greetings in eight other languages are in Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 9 languages. For the calendar after 1 January, see days of the week in Spanish.

The Christmas vocabulary, from decorations and presents to the food and the weather, is ranked by how often films say each word in Christmas words in Spanish.

Sources

• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario de la lengua española (23rd edition, online version 23.8.1): año (from Latin annus; the twelve months from 1 January to 31 December; año nuevo, "first day of the year", written with capitals in that sense, and "the year about to begin or just begun").
• Wiktionary: año and ano (each warning not to confuse it with the other); feliz año and próspero año nuevo ("happy New Year"); happy New Year (the Spain and Latin America labels); Año Nuevo; brindis, brindar, salud ("cheers"), cotillón, resaca, champaña, cava, cruda and guayabo; the Spanish translations of hangover, countdown and New Year’s resolution; and in Spanish, feliz año nuevo (with the year added: feliz año nuevo 2024).
• Wikipedia in Spanish: Doce uvas, for the 1909 Alicante story, the Abascal story of 1882 and the newspapers it cites (El Siglo Futuro and El Correo Militar, 2 January 1894; La Correspondencia de España, 1 January 1896, digitised in the Hemeroteca Digital of the Biblioteca Nacional de España), the grapes in tubs, the first broadcast in 1962 and the Canary Islands broadcast from 1983 to 1984; Reloj de Gobernación, for the clock of 1866, the quarter chimes and their spacing, the falling ball and the mistake of 1989; Nochevieja, for the customs country by country, including feliz año in Colombia and the colours and lentils in Mexico; Año viejo, for the figure, the testamento, the viudas and the countries; Cuesta de enero, with the dictionary and FundéuRAE entries it cites; and Resolución de año nuevo.
• Wikipedia in English: Twelve Grapes (citing Dorothy Gladys Spicer, Festivals of Western Europe, for the 1909 harvest) and New Year’s Eve.
• Andrés Aguiluz, Tradiciones chilenas para el año nuevo, This is Chile, 30 December 2016: lentils, grapes, yellow underwear and the suitcase.
• Katherine Castro, Conozca los agüizotes favoritos de los ticos para fin de año, CRHoy.com, 13 December 2017: the survey of 1,236 Costa Ricans.
• Alex Álvarez, 15 Curious Latino New Year’s Eve Traditions, ABC News, 27 December 2012.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_anonuevo.py in Verbavia’s repository and printed from its output rather than typed.