It has always seemed meaningless to me to celebrate the end of the year on December 31st, a date that doesn’t align with any astronomical event. On December 31, 2011, I wrote on my old blog about the futility of this date as a year’s end.

The Gregorian calendar has several disadvantages. The length of months and quarters is irregular. It has no year 0, and year 1 corresponds to the possibly misdated birth of Christ. This temporal division, established by an event that is not universal to humanity, also implies the existence of negative years, introducing an unreal historical discontinuity. The inclusion of the extra day at the end of the second month causes an uneven shift of dates across days of the week in subsequent years. Furthermore, the Gregorian calendar was imposed by the Catholic Church across all domains of Catholic metropolises. Two and a half centuries later, the British Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar and imposed it on its colonies. And gradually, the rest of the world ended up using it.

By March 2012, I was considering proposing a new calendar. I reviewed other proposals: solar, lunar, and lunisolar. The lunar cycles are highly variable, so I discarded the lunar and lunisolar calendar proposals. Regarding the number of months, I concluded that 12 is the best number of months: 12 is a highly composite number (divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12), which makes it easy to divide a year into periods of different lengths as convenient.

Among the reviewed proposals, I found the World Calendar and the Invariable Calendar, both perpetual, were the best. However, I do not think a perpetual calendar is the right solution for humanity’s current state. Advocates of perpetual calendars consider it a flaw of the Gregorian calendar, and of non-perpetual calendars in general, that each year begins on a different day of the week. They argue for the economic advantages of the symmetry in perpetual calendars, since every year is identical. These economic benefits come from savings in calendar printing and the homogeneity of accounting cycles. While I acknowledge these advantages, I don’t consider them sufficient reason to implement a perpetual calendar in a world that follows a cycle of workdays and rest days, that is, the week with its weekdays and weekends. It would be extremely sad to always have your birthday on a Monday… Human existence and culture cannot be reduced to economic advantages.

Regarding week length, taking into account the social and cultural functions of the week, I decided it should remain of 7 days. Furthermore, when dividing 365 by 7, the remainder is appropriately minimized. The remainder of this division is what causes dates to shift across the days of the week in subsequent years.

By June 2012, I had completed the first version, which I called the Plus Calendar, since the extra days, placed at the end of the last month, were designated + and ++. A friend told me that most people do not share this familiarity with symbols. So I decided to call both extra days 32. Naming them differently would have preserved the problem faced by people born on the leap day.

On June 29, 2012, I completed the version I called the Fixed Quarters Calendar. The year began approximately with the spring equinox in the north and autumn equinox in the south. This version still had the artificial division between Before Christ (BC) or Before the Common Era (BCE), and Anno Domini (AD) or Common Era (CE). In 2014, I decided to use the Human Era or Holocene Era system.

In early 2024, I renamed my proposal the Villoro Calendar, and in mid-2026 I decided to add the 32 to the name, because of Day 32. I also shifted the start of the year to the winter solstice in the north and the summer solstice in the south. With this modification, the beginning of the year falls just 10 days from the start of the Gregorian year, which would make the transition from the Gregorian Calendar to the Villoro32 Calendar easier.

The Villoro32 Calendar is my solar calendar proposal, which begins approximately at the solstice when the Sun reaches its greatest southern declination, that is, the winter solstice in the north, and summer solstice in the south. The year is divided into four identical quarters, except for the extra day placed at the end of the year. This calendar takes advantage of the symmetry of the perpetual calendar model, without actually being one. The year retains what we might call an internal symmetry. Furthermore, by using the Human Era for year numbering, cultural biases and artificial historical discontinuity are eliminated.