I wanted to warn everyone of a particularly bad school in Salamanca called Colegio Delibes. There are many great schools in salamanca, but this is not one of them. I attended the school for two months, and while the teaching was average to good, the administration of the school of was atrocious. A potential outbreak of lethal meningitis was not handled well by the school, potentially putting students at risk of death, when the college moved exposed students into the living quarters of non exposed students. In addition, the school does not respond well to requests by older students not to live with 18 year olds who stay up all night drinking and puking, and in one case the school did not do anything reply to a case of sexual harrassment in its living quarters. In the case of the death of a student, a tragic event, it was compounded when the director of the school started yelling at girls who were crying because of the death of their friend. Please do not make the same mistake I did. Choose another school in Salamanca, or better yet, study in Seville.
feel free to email me with questions or concerns

I also had a negative experience at Colegio Delibes in Salamanca. The teaching quality was really low and my classes were filled with 18 year olds who were more interested in getting pissed every night than actually learning Spanish. I found it to be a huge waste of money. This past summer, I studied at the Alhambra school in Sevilla and it was 100 times better. I would really recommend that school (also Sevilla is a much more entertaining town than Salamanca).

Hi there. I just read the 2 post regarding Salamanca and the particular school. Thank you very much for alerting us. We are considering sending our 15 yo son to Salamanca next year for 3 weeks of intensive study. We're not so sure that's a good idea now.

Would you recommend any schools in Sevilla based on your personal experience? Thank you.

Laurence beware!! Sevilla is known as a party town! I think the best idea is to choose a good school, as a young person could be led astray in either city if based at the wrong establishment. Try and locate a school with good testimonials.

I attended that school in 2003 and have had 3 friends go there since then. I really enjoyed it and found my teachers to be great. It sounds like you had a dreadful time, i bet it was very stressful. On what i experienced there i would tell people to go there and my mother is going in March for 6 weeks as i have attended 2 other langauage schools in spain and found of the 3 this was the best. But then again everybodies experiance is different.

Thanks filbert and edel. Not having visited Spain b4, we simply look at websites of language schools and requested info to be sent. Is there anywhere I can look up good schools with testimonials?

My wife and I will accompany our son to Spain next year (our 1st Europe trip in 20 years!) so we are hoping that when he studies in day time, we will play tourist and catch up with him in the evening.. to reduce the chance of getting into wrong company, if you can understand the worry of parents..

i think where you want to spend you holiday will depend on where your son will go to language school.I would say have a good look at the colleges and just rememeber just because they are expensive does not mean they are better.I bet if you got organised you could arrange a private tutor in most cites which could be more flexiable depend on what you want to do.also if you want to find out about a school as the college to send you an email addressof other people around your seons ages so they can swap experiences. Good Luck

Actually we wouldn't mind letting the location of the school to dictate where we would visit.

We're planning to spend six weeks in spain, half of that is for our son's language study and exposure, the other half for travelling around as a family, with our youngest daughter, 9yo.

We do hope to enrol in a school b4 setting off..and from what we read about prices so far, private tutoring is too expensive for us. Thanks for suggesting to get the sch to provide some contacts who are around the same age as our son. Will follow that up !

I went to a language school in Salamanca, ENFOREX. They are a little pricey but the staff was wonderful..in my experience.
I went during summer, so there were high schoolers interested in getting drunk,and being stupid, but you can meet many older and more mature students here as well. I stayed with a host family for 2 months.I loved the town and the school and was very pleased with my stay. I know ENFOREX has schools all over Spain, but I'm not sure how the other language programs are. I used ENFOREX in Madrid and wasn't very pleased with their staff.

Pretty much everywhere in spain there is a party culture. Spaniards enjoy life. I have heard great things about www.clic.es They give a ton of homework. I recommend sevilla (where they are located).I had a roomate who went there. I went to univ of sevilla. I would marvel at the amount of school-work that she had to do every day.