Salamanca is the most beautiful city you could possibly visit, and even more perfect to visit in your high school years. I highly recommend the program to anyone looking to improve their Spanish, have an amazing homestay experience, and make lasting friendships. The staff at the language institute genuinely care and are fun to be around, the planned activities are always a blast (example: playing soccer or touring a specific place in the city). Homestays are a great opportunity to improve your Spanish and see what it's like inside a Spanish home.

Oh man Salamanca was really fantastic. I'm not fluent in Spanish but my accent is much better and I did improve a lot. The city is gorgeous and the history of the area is pretty fantastic. Unfortunately it's not as immersive as you would think. My family didn't speak any english but all my roommates and EVERYONE at the school spoke english (except the teachers) SO all your friends will speak english and you'll end up speaking that with them.

I loved my host family though, I'd definitely recommend that rather than the residence, I had a really flexible family. We basically lived in an apartment my roommates and I and our host mom would come by for meals and say hello and talk with us about our families and our countries. Other people had a more conventional family, they'd live full time with them and always be around.

The classes were good, they are entirely in spanish, and so are the workbooks. If you are a beginner at spanish you probably won't get very much out of it, but the stronger your spanish already is the more you will learn. The teachers are mostly nice and the activities (though they are mandatory) are kinda cool if you can follow the explanations which are all in spanish. They are like tours of monuments and legends and things like that. If you go though don't go for only 1 week and go near the beginning of the summer there are more people there.

Overall it was great, I met a lot of people from all over the world (I think I counted 15 countries) and I did improve my Spanish a lot. It's not as serious as you think it might be (a lot of students go clubbing at night) but I think totally worth it.