Inguinal hernia repair is one of the most commonly performed operations worldwide. The recommended treatment is surgery, which has undergone important advances in the last two decades. Different anesthetic techniques have been proposed for carrying out such procedures, including local anesthesia, regional and general. Even though local anesthesia (so called monitored anesthesia care) is a more cost effective anesthetic technique for inguinal hernia repair, general and spinal anesthesia remain the most popular anesthetic techniques at university based teaching programs. It has been suggested that the use of local anesthetic techniques requires greater surgical skill in the handling of tissues and that, therefore, less skilled surgeons find it more convenient to operate under general or spinal anesthesia. The choice of anesthesia is influenced by several factors, including surgeon or anesthesiologist preferences, patient characteristics, cost or length of hospital stay. Despite its popularity, spinal anesthesia can lead to side effects as urinary retention, hypotension, motor block of lower extremities and headache. A recent systematic review evaluated studies on the influence of anesthetic technique in controlling the occurrence of postoperative pain in patients undergoing inguinal hernia repair. According to the authors, local anesthesia, with or without general anesthesia is more effective considering the avoidance of adverse events compared to spinal anesthesia. Traditionally, anesthesia and surgery studies have assessed outcomes such as time to wake or hospital stay and the incidence of nausea, vomiting, pain or other adverse events. Recently, a measurement that probes quality of life from the perspective of the patient has been considered as a more important factor in clinical studies that wish to investigate the effect of anesthesia and surgery on patient recovery and satisfaction. The Quality of Recovery-40 questionnaire (QoR-40), a validated instrument for this purpose, allows an objective evaluation of the factors that can influence the perception of the patient, and has been used successfully to assess the degree of recovery after several different surgical and anesthetic techniques. There are no recent data on the application of this instrument to assess which anesthetic technique, local infiltration under general anesthesia via laryngeal mask or spinal anesthesia, would provide better quality of recovery in the opinion of the patients undergoing inguinal hernia repair. The aim of the study is to perform a randomized clinical trial comparing the quality of recovery after local infiltration under general anesthesia via laryngeal mask or spinal anesthesia for unilateral inguinal hernia repair.