[2] Vernacular names which have been recorded for this herb in Castilian Spanish are calcitrapa, cardo estrellado, centaura estrellada, garbanzos del cura,[2][3][4] siempre nueva,[2][3] siempre-nueva,[4] and trapacaballos.

[1][5] It is presently placed in Augustin Pyramus de Candolle's section or subsection Phalolepis, along with Centaurea costae and the much more widely distributed C.

[6][7] In 2014 Hilpold et al. redefined the infrageneric taxa, classifying the traditional section Phalolepis in the subgenus Centaurea.

[6] The 2006 entry by Greuter in the Euro+Med Plantbase, based on a critical evaluation of the information from the Flora Europaea and the Med-Checklist, recognised the following infraspecific taxa:[2] In 2008 the chromosomes of the different infraspecific taxa were investigated (karyotypy).

[3] The name C. deusta, a species more widely distributed in southern Italy, Greece and Turkey,[7] has also historically been mistakenly said to occur in Spain, for example by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1838 in the Prodromus, in the 1865 issue of the Prodromus Florae Hispanicae of Heinrich Moritz Willkomm and Johan Lange, or by Carl Fredrik Nyman in his Conspectus Florae Europaeae (1878-1884).

deusta,[6] and this taxon continued to be recognised as occurring in Spain in the 2001 entry in the Atlas de la flora del Pirineo Aragonés.

The variety latronum is also known to cross with C. calcitra, creating C. ×eliasii, recognisable by having its involucral bracts being tipped by a large and sharp spine.

[3] Another hybrid of the species has also recently (2009) been described from a 1988 collection in an industrial zone in the Province of Soria: Centaurea ×soriana A.Segura ex Mateo & M.B.Crespo.

[3] It is most similar to Centaurea costae, being mainly distinguished by the shape of the involucral bracts.

In Spain it is found in the provinces of Ávila, Badajoz, Burgos, Cádiz, Cáceres, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Huelva, León, Madrid, Salamanca, Sevilla, Segovia, Soria, Toledo, Valladolid, Zaragoza and Zamora.

[3][6] The different subspecies and varieties now recognised are largely not sympatric and have discreet geographical distributions.

mauritanica had already been described by Jules Aimé Battandier in his 1889 Flore de l'Algérie as growing in Algeria, and an Algerian population of Centaurea was called as C. alba in the local flora until the 2000s, for example in the 1963 Nouvelle flore d'Algérie,[13][14] or the 1985 French collection on the Djebel Ich Ali near Tazoult in Batna wilaya.

[3] It is usually found growing in rocky, large-grained soil, very often calcareous mixed with silicates.

[6] The macrocephala variety occurs in matorral habitats on substrates derived from calcarenite and limestone.

These two taxa were assessed as 'data deficient', but were included because they have restricted distributions and the authors thought that they might be threatened, or at least impacted, by changes in agriculture.