Reported as new to science in 2000, it is only known from the Pyrenees mountain range in northern Spain and southwestern France, where it grows on horse dung in grass fields at elevations of 1,700 to 2,300 m (5,600 to 7,500 ft).

The possible depiction of this species in the 6,000-year-old Selva Pascuala rock art suggests that it might have been used in ancient religious rituals—the oldest evidence of such usage in prehistoric Europe.

The species was described by Mexican mycologist Gastón Guzmán in a 2000 publication, based on specimens collected by Ignacio Seral Bozal near Huesca in northern Spain in 1995.

They have a brownish-yellow wall greater than 1 μm thick and a broad apical germ pore with a short hilar appendix at the base (a region where the spore was once attached to the sterigma).

The hypodermium (the tissue layer directly under the pileipellis) is made of thin-walled, hyaline hyphae, 2.5–8 μm broad, with a brownish incrusting pigment.

[7] Guzmán and Castro report that a 17th-century medallion found in Tena Valley in the southern Pyrenees had images of a devil and mushrooms carved on it.

[5] It has been argued that prehistoric rock art at a site known as Selva Pascuala near the Spanish town of Villar del Humo offers evidence that P. hispanica was used in religious rituals 6,000 years ago.

The rock shelter at Selva Pascuala was discovered in the early 20th century; in the early 21st century it was noticed that objects in one of the murals, which previously had been described as "mushrooms", matched the general morphology of P. hispanica: the mural depicts a row of 13 mushroom-like objects with convex to conical caps, and ringless stems that vary from straight to sinuous (wavy).

In 1992, the Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini reported finding a painted mural dated 7000 to 9000 BCE portraying mushrooms,[8] later tentatively identified as Psilocybe mairei, a species known from Algeria and Morocco.