[3][4][5][6] The female is effectively inseparable from the house sparrow in its basic plumage, which is grey-brown overall but more boldly marked.

They are more easily distinguished in fresh winter plumage, with the eastern subspecies P. h. transcaspicus being paler with less chestnut.

This call is a pair of strident, disyllabic chirps, similar to those of the house sparrow, but louder and high-pitched, transcribed as chweeng-chweeng, cheela-cheeli.

A similar call, softer and more like the house sparrow's tschilp, is used by birds arriving or departing at roosting sites.

[2][10] On the Mediterranean islands of Malta, Gozo, Crete, Rhodes and Karpathos, there are more apparently intermediate birds of unknown status.

[11] The Spanish sparrow was first described by the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck as Fringilla hispaniolensis, from a specimen collected at Algeciras, in southern Spain.

[14] The Spanish sparrow has a highly complex distribution in the Mediterranean region, Macaronesia, and southwest to central Asia.

It breeds mostly in a band of latitude about 15 degrees wide, from the Danube Valley and the Aral Sea in the north to Libya and central Iran in the south.

This results suggests that Spanish sparrows' vagrancy and expansion may be facilitated in part by cargo trains.

[18] The western subspecies hispaniolensis breeds in parts of Iberia and North Africa, some islands, and the Balkans.

[15][17] It reached Madeira in May 1935, when numbers of sparrows were found across the island after nine days of strong, continuous easterly winds.

[15][17][23] The eastern subspecies transcaspicus breeds from Anatolia and Cyprus through the Middle East and Central Asia to far western China.

In Central Asia, it breeds from the regions of the Turkmenistan-Iran and Tajikistan-Afghanistan borders north to parts of the Syr Darya basin in Kazakhstan, and westwards to Lake Alakol, the Karatal River, and a corner of China.

In such areas, both species breed in farmland and open woodland, with the Spanish sparrow preferring moister habitats.

In Madeira the Spanish sparrow is common in cultivated areas, but it has not fully adapted to nesting in buildings or breeding in the drier north of the island.

[9][28][29] Like other sparrows, it feeds principally on the seeds of grains and other grasses, also eating leaves, fruits, and other plant materials.