Costumbrismo, the literature of manners and customs, corresponds roughly to the French tradition of the moralistes and to the spectatorial essays in the tradition of Addison and Steele, both of which are rooted in the genre of character sketches from Theophrastos to Boileau. In the 19th century, this genre developed in what (following the reflections of Walter Benjamin) has been called “panoramatic” literature, offering surveys of entire societies to modern readers. The Spanish adoption of this genre took on a special role, in that costumbrismo combined gently satirical outlines of social types with a growing appreciation of local colour, both at the nationally Spanish level and at the level of Spain’s subsidiary regions. Costumbrismo could, as a result, function both as a genre formulating a Spanish cultural self-image (something which lies at the root of a discourse of national identity) and a regionalist celebration of  Spain’s cultural diversity – and as such a forerunner of the particularisms, regionalisms and later nationalisms of some peripheral regions. Only in the case of Andalusia did its very pronounced local-colour costumbrismo feed into a Spanish national self-image rather than into a sense of regional separateness (Serafín Estebanez Calderón, Escenas andaluzas, 1847).

Costumbrismo was expressed in various cultural fields. The pictorial tradition is covered in the article on Spanish visual arts. The literary expression took place both in non-fictional prose (character sketches and spectatorial essays) and in local-colour fiction. A very popular genre was that of “panoramatic” series of “self-portrait” vignettes, inspired by the successful French publication Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840-42). Mariano José de Larra introduced this genre into Spain with Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (1843-44), which, tellingly, opened with a vignette on “El torero”. It was immediately followed by the inevitable gender inflection El álbum del bello sexo o las mujeres pintadas por sí mismas (1843); later gendered spin-offs were Las españolas pintadas por los españoles (1871-72) and Las mujeres españolas, portuguesas y americanas (1872; 1873; 1876). Over the following decades, a host of regional variants followed suit, initially heralded by colonial exoticism: Los cubanos pintados por sí mismos (1852), Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (1854), Los valencianos pintados por sí mismos (1859), El álbum de Galicia: Tipos, costumbres y leyendas (1897).

In dramatic and fictional literature, costumbrismo played into the continuing use of the Theophrastan character sketch as a mode of narrative characterization. As a feature of the popular drama of the 19th century, it often took an anti-Romantic tone; Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza’s Contigo, pan y cebolla (1833) satirized starry-eyed Romantic bohemianism. But in the novel, costumbrismo had a decisive impact on the development from Romanticism to Realism. Costumbrista novels played on the narrative of recognizable or salient social types (much as with Balzac or Dickens); but these types tended to be collective rather than eccentrically individual, in line with the rise of sociology and ethnography, physiognomy or phrenology that sought to characterize human types and their psychological temperaments by systematic classifications. While in the novel this played into the general rise of realism and, later, naturalism, Spanish novelistic costumbrismo is, again, also dominated by the search for regional types, often inflected by class divisions. La gaviota (1849) by Cecilia Böhl (“Fernan Caballero”) was set in an Andalusian fishing village, Cantabria was the background for the countryside-city opposition in Peñas arriba (1895) by José Maria de Peleda (1833–1906), Alejandro Pérez Lugín’s La casa de Troya (1915) immortalized Santiago de Compostela as a university town.

Such costumbrista novels, set in a recognizable present rather than a Romantic past, foreshadowed not only the rise of novelistic Realism and naturalism, but also the Generation of ’98, whose authors were deeply concerned not only with the political condition of Spain, but also with what they felt to be Spain’s deep, authentic, though regionally diverse, cultural identity. Blasco Ibáñez mixed Social Realism and bullfighting local colour in his Sangre y arena (“Blood and sand”, 1908); Unamuno reflected on the Spanish character and landscape (En torno al casticismo, 1895; Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, 1905; Por tierras de Portugal y España, 1911); so did Azorín in El alma castellana (1900) and España: Hombres y paisajes (1909).