Scolymus maculatus is a spiny annual plant in the family Asteraceae, native to the Mediterranean region in southern Europe, southwest Asia, and northern Africa, and also the Canary Islands.

The plant is known as scolyme taché in French, cardogna macchiata in Italian, cardo borriquero in Spanish, and escólimo-malhado in Portuguese, חוח עקוד in Hebrew and سنارية حولية in Arabic.

[4] The flowerheads are seated at the end of the stem or in the limbs of the higher leaves, and are arranged in roundish clusters, which are subtended by more than five leaflike bracts.

These surround the common floral base (or receptacle), which is mostly 7–11 mm in diameter conical in shape and is set with ovate papery bracts called chaff or paleae.

[4] Golden thistles are assigned to the Cichorieae tribe that shares anastomosing latex canals in both root, stem and leaves, and has flower heads only consisting of one type of floret.

S. hispanicus is an annual, biennial or perennial of up to 1.75 m high and it also has one, two or three spiny dentate leaf-like bracts subtending each cluster of flowerheads and the yellow, orange or white florets also lack black hairs.

[4] The species naturally occurs on the Canary Islands, Madeira and along the Mediterranean, notably in Portugal, Spain (including on the Baleares), France (the coast of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, and the departements Vaucluse, Lot, Bas-Rhin and Somme), Italy (Sicily, Sardinia, Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria Apulia, Molise and Abruzzo), Malta, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Tunesia, Algeria and Morocco.

[1][2][4][5] Scolymus maculatus is nitrophilous plant, that prefers deep, rich, but disturbed clayey soils in sunny or lightly shaded positions, such as fallowed or abandoned fields, ditches and roadsides.