I remember I was surprised when I learned English at school, because they seemed to make a lot of emphasis on the present continuous and past continuous, and I found them trivial: they work exactly the same as in Spanish, i.e., at least off the top of my head, every English sentence analogous to "I am/was eating" can be translated literally into Spanish directly as "Yo estoy/estaba comiendo" without a second thought, and vice versa. It's not something where a native Spanish speaker learning English would make mistakes, even from a very basic level.
On the other hand, from the Spanish point of view it's much, much easier to make mistakes with the present simple, because there are many things that you can say with the present simple in Spanish but not in English. For example, to ask someone what they are eating in the present moment (not in general), in Spanish you could use both "¿qué estás comiendo?" and "¿qué comes?" (the second being more common in informal speech) and you could answer both "estoy comiendo kebab" and "como kebab". In English the first versions work ("what are you eating? I am eating kebab") but the second ones don't ("what do you eat?" "I eat kebab") and it's a super common error to make for beginner/intermediate learners, but almost no emphasis was made on that because we were busy doing a lot of exercises about writing sentences in present continuous.
I guess it was an effect of using British books written for a global audience (not tailored specifically to learners coming from Spanish) and the teachers following the books without questioning or adapting their methodology.
