About
Hola, I’m Andrew.
I’m a Canadian who fell hard for the Iberian Peninsula — specifically the old, quiet, slightly crumbling bits that don’t make the front of the guidebooks. These days I live in Portugal, soaking up centuries of history and culture without the elbow-to-elbow crowds.
Castizo Spain is my attempt to bottle that feeling and hand it to you. It’s a directory of Spain’s officially protected heritage towns — the kind of places where you turn a corner, find a 900-year-old church with nobody else around, and wonder why this isn’t on every itinerary.
So what does “castizo” even mean?
Good question. Castizo(cas·TEE·tho) is one of those gorgeous Spanish words that doesn’t translate cleanly. It means authentic, genuine, true to its roots — the real deal, unspoiled and unmistakably of its place. A castizo neighbourhood is the one where the traditions never left. A castizo town is the one that still feels like itself.
That’s the whole brief for this site: skip the polished, interchangeable tourist traps and point you toward the places that are still, stubbornly, the genuine article.
What this site is for
One goal: to help you curate an authentictravel experience. Every town here earned its place the honest way — by being officially designated a Conjunto Históricoby the Spanish state, not by paying for a spot on a “top 10 prettiest villages” listicle.
I pull the hard facts from open sources (Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons), lean on AI to draft the overviews, then add my own notes for the places I’ve actually walked through. No ads, no sponsors, no tourism-board kickbacks. Just the good stuff.
Tell me I’m wrong (please)
I’d genuinely love your feedback. Found a mistake? Know a town that deserves more love? Been somewhere recently and the details have drifted? Drop me a line at hey@castizospain.com — it makes the whole thing better for the next traveller.