Specchia takes its name from the term specchie, which stood for a pile of flat stones (also huge) risalienti the Iron Age, intended for the defense and act as lookout.

Set in the Salento, 53 km from the provincial capital, is part of the club's most beautiful villages in Italy.

In 2007 the town was recognized as the best emerging rural destination in Italy of the Eden Project .

The municipality is located in the hinterland of Specchia of Salento, midway between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea.

This village is situated at 131 meters above sea level, on a small hill at the foot of the Serra Magnone almost completely planted with olive trees and organized in terraces of dry stone walls of containment, in an area totally flat. This represented, with being too far from the sea, a safe place for the men of the early Middle Ages, so that the population increased in a short time.

The municipality includes the town of Cardigliano, an agricultural village built during the fascist era (1930) for tobacco processing.

Some news about the housing settlement of Specchia dating back to the Norman period and the beginning of the feudal period, around the year one thousand and was subjected to the domination of the centuries many families: the Monteroni, Orsini, del Balzo, the Guarini, the Artus, Protonobilissimo, the de Capua, the  della Ratta, the Astore, the Falcone, the Pignatelli, the Ripa and accounts Risolo, until August 2, 1806, the date of the end of feudalism.

Of particular rielievo are artistic ;

The Palace of the Counts Risolo: built in the eighteenth century on the ruins of an earlier century building ;

The Palace Scoto: from the splendid seventeenth-century facade ;

The underground church of Our Lady of the Passo;

The Francescani Neri monastery: with the church equipped with valuable rifinimenti Gothic chapel in honor of St. Catherine of Alexandria, and the crypt containing frescoes in Byzantine style.

The coat of arms is a flowering almond resting on a pile of stones and surmounted by a crown with five towers.