A large part of the sculptures discovered in the Roman towns and villae of Hispania were made in the great productive centres of the Empire – mainly Rome and the Eastern Mediterranean. However, it is also documented the existence of endogenous workshops, which are the focus of this paper.

In Hispania, the identification of local officinae is easier due to the existence of several outcrops of white marbles in the Iberian Peninsula. These were exploited from a relatively early period to craft sculptures, mainly in the provinces of Baetica and Lusitania. Local sculpture workshops in Hispania date back to the 1st century BC. They are clearly identifiable because they mostly work with rough limestones, that were stuccoed and polychromed. The first artisans were immigrants, mainly born in Italy. They arrived at the same time as the colonists and negotiatores settled in the newly founded towns. Since then, the local sculptural traditions established in each territory continued throughout the whole Early Imperial period. From the first decades of the 1st century AD, the sculptures manufactured in Hispania began to be made only with marble. The marbles used were quarried in the Iberian Peninsula itself but also imported from Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor.

The main production centres of Roman sculpture in Hispania were in the provincial capitals (Tarraco, Augusta Emerita and Colonia Patricia). However, there were also important workshops in some coloniae of the province Baetica and other towns, like Barcino. Some of these officinae transcended the local sphere and even exported their manufactures, so that they can be considered as regional workshops. Sometimes, the scope of these regional workshops was hugely wide, and meet the demands of towns and territories far from their area of influence and even their province. The most outstanding of these is the workshop of Augusta Emerita, as evidenced by the identification of Lusitanian marble from Estremoz in sculptures from several areas of Hispania citerior.