Zinda: The Spanish House Bringing Bold Colour and Sculptural Heels to Estela

Every brand in this collection has a job to do. Hispanitas taught us what comfort built into construction actually looks like. Joni showed us what seventy years in the same family, in the same town, does to a shoe. Zinda's job is different — and honestly, it's the one piece the collection was missing.

Zinda makes the shoe you reach for when the leather and the loafer aren't enough. The sculptural heel. The metallic finish that catches the light instead of hiding from it. The pair that turns an outfit into a decision.

Here's where they come from.

Elche, and the early 1960s

Zinda was founded in Elche, in Spain's Alicante province, in the early 1960s by Manuel Martínez Linares. Elche sits in the same shoemaking region as Elda and Petrer — the Vinalopó valley, which has produced a disproportionate share of the world's better footwear for more than a century, and is also where Joni is based. It's a small radius of towns with an outsized reputation, and Zinda has been part of that reputation for over sixty years.

What's stayed consistent across those six decades is the brief: make shoes for a woman who wants quality without needing to be quiet about her style. That's a different starting point to Hispanitas, whose founding idea was about comfort meeting fine construction, or Joni, whose whole identity is built around slow, handmade craft in one workshop. Zinda started from design — from the idea that a well-made shoe is allowed to be a statement.

Bold by design, not by accident

The Zinda signature is a sculptural heel — shapes that behave more like an object than a fitting, in colours the rest of the market tends to play safe on. Metallics that read as jewellery rather than just leather. Slingbacks and Mary Janes finished in tones you don't expect from a shoe brand. It's a house that treats colour and shape as the main event, not decoration on top of a safe design.

None of that comes at the expense of how the shoe is actually made. Zinda's collections are produced in Spain using the same premium leathers and traditional construction techniques you'd expect from any serious Alicante house — precise stitching, proper finishing, the kind of attention that means a bold shoe still holds its shape and its comfort a year in. The boldness is in the design brief. The standards are the same ones we hold every other brand in this collection to.

What Zinda shoes are actually like to wear

The honest answer is: we're finding out alongside you. Zinda has just landed at Estela, and rather than tell you secondhand what a shoe feels like on the foot, we'd rather you discover it and tell us.

What we can tell you is what the brand is built for — versatility across day and night, a silhouette that goes from desk to dinner without changing shoes, and a level of finish that holds up under a close look, not just a glance across a room. That's the standard every Zinda style had to clear before it made it into this collection, the same as it was for the very first styles Estela ever stocked.

Why Zinda, and why now

Estela's range has grown with this new season launch, and that growth gave us room to bring in a brand that plays a genuinely different role to the ones already here. Hispanitas and Joni both, in their own ways, make the case for comfort and craft as the foundation of a good shoe. Zinda makes the case that a shoe built to that same standard doesn't have to stay quiet about it.

If you'd like the fuller picture of why we buy from this part of Spain at all, we've written about it here: Why Spanish Leather Shoes Are Worth the Investment and Spanish Shoes vs Italian Shoes: What's the Difference?

Zinda is the newest name in that story, and the boldest one so far.

Explore the Zinda collection →

Frequently asked questions

Where are Zinda shoes made? Zinda shoes are made in Spain. The brand was founded in Elche, in the Alicante province, which remains one of Europe's principal footwear manufacturing regions.

Who founded Zinda? Zinda was founded in the early 1960s by Manuel Martínez Linares.

What is Zinda known for? Zinda is known for bold, fashion-forward design — sculptural heel shapes, vibrant colour and metallic finishes, and silhouettes built to transition from daytime to evening wear.

How is Zinda different from Estela's other Spanish brands? Where Hispanitas is built around comfort engineered into the construction and Joni around slow, handmade craft, Zinda's identity centres on bold design — statement heels and colour, made to the same Spanish manufacturing standard.

Are Zinda shoes true to size? Zinda has only just joined the Estela collection, so we'll update this with our own fit notes as customers wear them in. In the meantime, check each product page for style-specific sizing guidance.

Where can I buy Zinda shoes in Australia? Estela stocks a curated selection of Zinda styles, hand-chosen and shipped across Australia. Browse the Zinda collection here.

Zinda has just landed at Estela. Shop the collection →