Hadn't seen this thread before
First of all, spanish regulation regarding departure times is exactly the same as in civilized Europe (that is ETOT +/- 15) ... since aproximately two months.
Don't nail me on the exact date but around the last week of June there was a norm stating that in Spain no aircraft could be airborne before its EOBT.
As an example, if you are in an airport with 5 min taxitime and you filed ETOT at 1200 then in Spain you could not have been airborne before 1155. In the rest of Europe and nowadays also in Spain the earliest airborne would be 1145.
From a strictly normative point of view the ATCO did therefore not act correctly.
The above is probably the sentence you wanted to read and I must stand to it but would like to offer 2 caveats:
1) As Heathrow Director already said, there could be other reasons for the delay.
I do not know the specifics about the airport where you had this issue, perhaps it is customary in order to avoid conflict with whatever other issue... nevertheless I take from your posts that you already questioned the ATCO to verify that.
2) ATC situation in Spain is not what it should be, not by a long way. Do you know how I was informed of that regulation change? By an RYR pilot who also was not precisely happy to have his departure delayed.
We had recieved about 2 months earlier an internal memo from AENA in which the change of procedure was mentioned, but it did not include any fixed date and in any case we took it as yet another internal change. Since there was a written norm stating otherwise we asked for clarification stating that obviously between a company norm and spanish law we would follow the latter.
Never heard again of that untill that conversation with the pilot and afterwards it took me about an hour to get confirmation of that change.
Does this excuse the delay you suffered? Not really but it does offer explanation on how this deficiences in service may arise... other than the controller simply trying to overcompensate an acute inferiority complex.
Let me apologize on his/her behalf and in any case I would ask you for some patience. If this should happen again I kindly ask you to ask precisely why you are being delayed and to inform the atco if the explanation offered does not apply to you ... prefereably not on the main frequency. It will probably not help you but might be of value to the next flights when the atco has time to reflect on what you said.