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I've been to Spain and spent quite a bit of time there. Yes, you will find beautiful women as in any other country in the world, and like someone mentioned, they're called stereotypes for a reason. I, being a female, went with the idea that Spaniard men were the stereotypical macho, alpha, romantic males, but that couldn't be further from the truth. They're much colder than what I expected them to be, I found men from other cultures much more warm and romantic. In this sense, I guess Spanish men and women tend to be more "European" than Latin. Also, Spain is an extremely regionalized country, and this means people from different regions behave (and look) quite different. Southern Spaniards are known to be much warmer and friendlier than the ones living in Madrid and Barcelona for example.
spanish, french, portuguese, italians, etc are all latins.
How can someone say that Southern Spaniards look different from Northern Spaniards and at the same time say that British look like Northern Spaniards?
Southern Spain was repopulated by Northern Spaniards. It's common to find Galician, Basque and even Catalan surnames in Andalucia (not to mention Castilian surnames, which are the most common by far). Granada for instance was repopulated by people from Galicia and Asturias after Fernando & Isabella expelled the muslims in 1492.
During the times of the Spanish Empire Seville, Huelva and Cádiz where the main ports of Spain. A lot of people from what today is Germany, Italy and the Netherlands (Charles V's territories) moved to those cities to work as traders. It's quite common to find blond and blue-eyed people in those cities. For instance these two humorists from Seville:
The "darker peoples of the South" are actually dark because of the gypsies, who settled mostly in Andalusia when they came to Iberia.
Spoiler
First of all the Jews did not invade anything. They had been living in Iberia before 711 AD. The Islam in Spain was during the first centuries quite unique. There was an elite from the Middle East (Ummayad) and a bunch of Berber soldiers from the previously Roman provinces of Northern Africa. The rest of the muslims were simply converted Iberian and Visigoth peoples. Those people from the Middle East and Northern Africa mixed with the local population. For instance Abd-ar-Rahman III, emir of Córdoba was the son of a Basque concubine and also his paternal grandmother was from Navarre. He is described as:
Those mixes created a unique form of Islam. For instance drinking wine was a common practice, while it was prohibited in the rest of the muslim world. There were muslims, jews and christians living in the same cities, althoug the two latter had to pay more taxes.
It wasn't until the Almoravid (an extremist branch of Islam) invasion in the 11th century when this peaciful coexistence ended. Jews and christians were expelled and migrated to the Christian kingdoms of the North, where they tried to force the Christians kings to fight against the muslims.
As the Christian kingdoms expanded their territory to the South of Iberia they forced the muslim populations to concentrate in a smaller area (Kingdom of Granada). When this kingdom was conquered by Fernando & Isabella in 1492 the muslims were forced to either convert to christianism or leave the Iberian peninsula. Some of them ("Moriscos") converted falsely and were expelled one century later.
"Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the Ice Age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. Overall, three quarters of our modern gene pool (two thirds in England) derives from this early source."
http://racialreality.110mb.com/britons.html
"The Welsh and Irish Celts have been found to be the genetic blood-brothers of Basques, scientists have revealed. ... [Professor David Goldstein of University College London] and his colleagues looked at Y-chromosomes, passed from father to son, of Celtic and Norwegian populations. They found them to be quite different. ... To try to work out where the Celtic population originally came from, the team from UCL, the University of Oxford and the University of California at Davis also looked at Basques. 'On the Y-chromosome the Celtic populations turn out to be statistically indistinguishable from the Basques,' Professor Goldstein said."
the typical stereotype of Spanish women is that the all look like models and spend all their time perfecting that image so i was wondering what are Spanish women really like
This is absolutely true, without fail.
Every woman born of a geopolitical area is, without fail, the same.
spanish, french, portuguese, italians, etc are all latins.
I know. What I meant to say was that Spanish people are more "European" in feel than, say, Latin American people who they're commonly associated with (because of the language).
I don't think all of this is accurate. Actually I find some points ridiculous. And I'm not saying Portuguese girls are not like that, let me explain:
To start with Spain and Portugal have been mixing with one another for centuries, also take into account Spain is much bigger (504,000 km2 vs 93,000 Km2), much more populated (46 millions vs 12 millions), and with far far far more amount of foreign population. So, I highly doubd Portuguese girls are that "special" that can't be found here in Spain, specially, yes, also with the historical ties.
And nothing you described there makes any difference with what you can find in Spain.
We also have the pigmentation difference from north to south (some times it's natural, other times it's caused by the sun), also a lot of blondes and redheads (even more in Spain than in Portugal) and a lot of mixed childs, specially in Madrid and Barcelona (these two regions alone are more populated than the entire Portugal and with far more foreign population). Africans and Latinamericans? Much more here in Spain than in Portugal. We also have had a lot of ties with Latinamerica and I think we come second or third regarding african population in Europe. Just look at the immigration charts.
Actually no offense, but as I said we have much more people of all kind here as we are more populated and bigger, so I don't think Portuguese girls are that "different" that can't be found in a country with such a lot of variated people as is Spain, and so close to Portugal.
Actually there was relatively little mixing between the Portuguese and Spaniards, except for the border regions maybe. These two countries have been enemies for many centuries and fought many a war. Portugal is the oldes country of Europe, has been around in its current form since the 13th century, there has been much more African input than Spanish one. The only Spanish region where people are very similar to the Portuguese is Galicia, which some say is like an unofficial Portuguese province.
BECAUSE of Portugal's small size in terms of both area and population it is different from Spain, but also because of history, especifically the colonial times when, unlike Spain, Portugal was focused on and closely tied to Africa. There are Africans in Spain, too, but they are much more recent immigrants, whereas in Portugal there has been a lot of mixing going on for centuries. Thus black genes are much more common in the Portuguese population.
Your logic is unlogical. You keep saying that Spain is a lot bigger and more diverse than Portugal, and use that to prove your point that the Spaniards are not different from the Portuguese. That makes no sense. As I have said before, while of course there are people in both countries which might be from either country, the bulk of the Portuguese population is clearly different from any Spanish region, except maybe Galicia, or Spain as a whole. And the Portuguese are fiercly proud of being different from the Spaniards, and probably vice versa. This is a very old dislike, that dates back about a thousand years and has helped maintain the difference between the Portuguese and the Spaniards.
Put 10 strangers from Portugal and Spain before me and I can tell you just from the face and body who is Portuguese and who is Spanish in 8 or 9 cases out of those ten.
No, I didn't mean Portuguese are like the Spaniards, but that in Spain you can find the Portuguese apperance also at big quantities, that's why I brought out the Spain's diversity.
About the other... I suspect you have some sort of disliking toward Spain so you want to believe Portuguese people has a special appearance, so I think it's more sensible for me to just leave the discussion.
And no offense, but Spaniards are not proud of being different from the Portuguese, because of what I said earlier, and because we don't usually take into account Portugal for such affairs. And no, we don't dislike Portugal, far from it. We are just careless or maybe SOME (not all) Spaniards look down to Portuguese but I don't think there is disliking really.
Well, I guess anyone who has lived in and traveled both countries will have noticed the differences...
No, I don't have anything against Spain or Spaniards, I am neither Portuguese, nor Spanish, but a foreigner from Central Europe, so my view of the whole situation is pretty objective.
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