Types of gotelé: how to recognise yours and what changes when it comes off

Anyone searching for “types of gotelé” — the spattered, bumpy texture on the walls and ceilings of so many Spanish flats — almost always has one in front of them: in the flat they have just bought, in the one they are about to renovate to let, or in the one they have lived in for years. And they want to know what they are dealing with before asking for a quote. Quite right, because there is not one gotelé but several, and the difference shows on the bill.

It helps to separate two questions that tend to get mixed up. The first is what it is made of: distemper (temple), which dissolves in water, or plastic-bound, which does not. You can find that out in a couple of minutes with a damp sponge, and we explain how on our gotelé and skimming page. The second is what its relief is like, and that is what this article is about, because it is the one that decides how much work it takes to get the wall smooth.

How gotelé is made, and why no two are the same

Gotelé is a paste — distemper or plastic — thrown at the wall in drops. Consumer, the consumer magazine published by EROSKI, describes it like this for the distemper kind: “a special paste for ‘throwing drops’ is used, which is applied over a surface of smooth distemper”. The size of the drop, the pressure of the machine and how thick the paste is decide the grain, and since every crew set things up its own way, two flats in the same building can have very different gotelé.

The types you can see

When it comes to removing or covering it, the name hardly matters. What counts is the height of the relief, and in practice there are three, plus one that gets mistaken for them.

Fine gotelé

A small, low, tightly packed grain. Run your hand over it and it feels like coarse sandpaper, but it does not scratch. It is the easiest to cover: the filler goes over it without a fight.

Coarse, or peaked, gotelé

Bigger, more widely spaced drops that left peaks as they dried. It scratches when you run your hand over it, collects dust on the top of each peak and, seen from the side, looks like a miniature landscape. It is the one that takes the most work, and the animation further down shows why.

Flattened gotelé

This is ordinary gotelé that had a trowel run over it before it dried, to squash the drops. What is left are flat islands with a slightly raised edge, and much less height than the peaked kind. From a distance it looks like uneven stucco; up close, each island keeps the round shape of the drop it once was.

The one that looks like gotelé and is not: roller stipple

Some textured walls are not made with drops but with a roller: a thick paste with a foam roller passed over it. According to Consumer, the more times the roller goes over it, the finer the stipple (picado) ends up. You can tell it apart because it has no round drops, just a continuous speckle. To remove or cover it, it is treated like a gotelé of the same height.

How to tell which one you have: a torch and the lights off

In full light, all gotelé looks alike. To really see it, lower the blind, switch off the light and hold a torch against the wall, pointing almost parallel to it. Raking light stretches the shadows and the relief stands out on its own:

• Short, closely spaced shadows: fine.
• Long shadows, one for each peak: coarse.
• Flat patches with a rim of shadow around them: flattened.
• A continuous speckle, with no round drops: roller stipple.

It is the same light used to check a freshly skimmed wall before painting it, and for the same reason: head-on, you cannot see the relief.

What it changes on the job

Covering gotelé is not a matter of piling on filler until it disappears. Skimming pastes go on in thin layers. Papresa’s data sheet for its gotelé-covering paste calls for layers of between 0.5 and 2 mm, “since absorption prevents a heavier load”, and two coats over the gotelé: “one to fill the ‘drop’ and, once dry, a second finishing coat will be applied”. It is designed, it says, for gotelé about 2 mm deep.

With that in front of you, the sums do themselves: the usual two coats are enough when the relief fits inside them, and fall short when it does not.

Knocking the peaks down before starting, with a scraper or a sander hooked up to a vacuum, saves filler, but it is another stage with its own dust. Which pays off depends on the wall. And on gotelé that sounds hollow when you tap it, neither is a good idea: that one comes off.

If yours is distemper, the relief matters less, because it comes off when wetted, fine or coarse. What decides the job then is the state of the wall that appears underneath, and we go through that step by step in how we remove gotelé. If you would rather not strip it, wall skimming explains when it can be covered over and when it cannot.

If the flat is near the sea

On the coast there is one more reason to check what your gotelé is made of, not just what it looks like. Average relative humidity in Málaga is 65% over the year and rises to 72% in December, according to the climate normals for the airport published by AEMET, Spain’s state weather agency. With the air that heavily laden, bathrooms, kitchens and north-facing bedrooms get condensation more easily in winter.

And that is exactly what distemper copes with worst. Consumer puts it bluntly: it is not washable and, “in case of damp, mould may form on its surface”, so it should not go where there is condensation. If your gotelé is distemper and has dark patches in the corners or behind the wardrobes, a coat of paint will not fix it. Nor will painting over it in another material: for that, the same source says, “the distemper paint must be removed”, because its presence is one of the reasons a new coat fails to bond.

And if the patch comes back after it has been removed, the problem was never the gotelé but the damp, and that has to be solved before anything is skimmed.

If the flat is a seasonal let

The job has its slot when the flat stands empty, between October and March. Removing or covering the gotelé in a whole home is a matter of days, not hours, because the pace is set by the drying of each coat, and in the cold, drying times get longer. Best not to cut it fine before the first tenant arrives, and to leave enough margin for each coat to dry for as long as it needs.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Papresa, data sheet for “Papresa enlucido ‘L’ C6”, a paste for covering gotelé and skimming walls (PDF).
• EROSKI Consumer, “Pintura al temple” (distemper paint).
• AEMET, “Valores climatológicos normales”, Málaga Aeropuerto (climate normals for Málaga Airport).

Quotations from Spanish-language documents are our own translations.

Questions about your own wall? Send us a photo taken with the torch and we will tell you what you have.