Office Insight: Spanish Tile Trends from Cevisama 2025

Excerpts from article published online on March 10, 2025. View the full story here.

Every year, the ceramic tile industry takes things up another few notches thanks to rapidly changing technologies and processes and the 23rd edition of Spanish tile fair Cevisama, which drew a crowd of more than 70,000 at the end of February, despite the host city of Valencia encountering devastating floods just months prior, proved that 2025 is no exception. There were some clear trends in color and style, such as a return to terracotta and continuation of wood, cement and stone looks, but what stood out the most were the new textures, both realistic and, some might say, “unreal.”

Technological Wonders

The bulk of the innovations we spotted were the result of advancements and exploration in two different areas. “Because the glaze industry is located here, the Spanish are often the early adopters of new glazing technology and their utilization of it is a bit more refined because they’ve had more experience with it,” said Ryan Fasan, Tile of Spain consultant. Spain, it so happens, is also a leader in inkjet printing on ceramic tile, and “the cutting edge of the technology now is being able to print volume on a surface in an additive way or create effects that actually reduce volume from the surface in a subtractive way in tandem with the graphic file that’s being printed.”

In other words, the surfaces increasingly have a more authentic quality about them as their touchable and viewable textures more closely align with the graphics, be they simulations of reclaimed barn wood or concrete city sidewalks. The following is just a taste of what Spanish tile manufacturers were most recently able to accomplish by combining these technologies.

Extruded Tile Pushing the Envelope

Most of the world’s tile manufacturers produce dry-pressed tiles as opposed to extruded, but the Spanish tile industry is a rare case: Fasan estimates that about 10% of the manufacturers in Spain currently specialize in extruded tile, particularly of the modern variety. At this year’s fair, we saw several such manufacturers showcasing new extruded products that were both attractive and serving a function, such as marble-look ventilated-façade systems, slate-mimicking terrace floors with matching pool components, and whimsical retro-mod–style clay breeze blocks.

At Your Convenience

A final trend ever present at this year’s Cevisama was product designed to make installation and selection a breeze. For instance, popular layout patterns—such as herringbone, parquet, checkerboard, and classic brickwork—were actually recreated with seemingly individual units in a single large-format tile to help speed up the layout and installation process. Particularly making a comeback in this category is the Versailles pattern, which typically uses a combination of four different formats to present a somewhat random appearance. In the past, one had to carefully pre-plan and purchase the correct number of each tile size, as well as ensure the colors matched (or didn’t match).