  The last few years witnessed a change of perspective in the context of galaxy
formation and evolution. The major role played by bars in the history of these
fundamental building blocks of our universe was finally realized. However, and
despite the fact that one of the major concerns of any physical science is to
measure timescales for natural phenomena, we have as yet no established way to
estimate the ages of these important galactic components. In this contribution
we outline the method we developed to estimate bar ages and briefly describe
its first results.
