10 ''Interesting'' Town Names in Spain

Welcome to my first ever blog series on JetPunk, where we'll look into funny or interesting city or town names around the world. Today we'll look into 10 Spanish cities or towns.

Population: 374

In Spanish 'mal' means bad or badly, while 'cocinado' means cooked, so this town is literally called 'Badly Cooked', which is kind of a weird name for a town.

For those wondering abour the origin of the name, there are many hypothesis,one of them being that it evolved from the person who founded the town, who might have been called Marcos Cinado.

Population: 16 335

''The Heads of Saint John'' sounds like a pretty violent name to me, like if someone had cut off someone's head or something. Anyways,  this town is famous for being the place where a pronunciamiento (essentially a coup d'état) happenned on the 1st of January 1820 against absolutism, which reinstated the liberal constitution of 1812 for three years.

Population: 2 117

This small town's name means ''quotation marks''. However ''unimportant'' this town may seem, it actually is one of the few places outside Catalonia with a building designed by famous modernist architecht Gaudí. It was also used in the 19th and early 20th century as a summer vacation spot for the Spanish Royals.

The name of the town seems to come from the celtic root kamb- becoming Kombillas before being latinized and evolving into the its current form, so nothing to do with the symbols with whom it shares a name in Spanish.

Population: 41 622

This is a Spanish municipality entirely surrounded by the municipality of Murcia, capital city of the region. The name translates to 'sewer', so yeah... doesn't really sound like a place someone would like to live in, right?

The name actually evolves from Al-Qantara Asqaba, ''The Nearest Bridge'' in Arabic, as it was called duing the muslim rule in the area.

Population: 298

Living here must be nuts, so sad there are only a few hundred people from here. 

In all seriousness, Nuez does actually mean ''Nut'' in Spanish. Yeah, nothing more to say about it.

Population: 385

I mean, no need for a translation this time... To be fair, to a Spaniard this is just a normal town name, which maybe stands out for being short and having two of the same vowel in a row, but Poo is not a word in Spanish.

It's name in Asturian is Po which makes it the shortest in Spain( if you consider the Asturian name instead of the Spanish one) along with the next entry on this list.

Anyone wanna visit Poo Beach (Playa de Poo)?

Population: 820

Shortest place name in Spain. Located on a short river. Nothing else, to say, this short explanation is enough. Ahh, wait, it's also the name of a game company beloved for its practices.

Population: 124 772

This is a fairly important and known about city in Spain, whose name simply means... 'Lion'. Who could have guessed, right?

Anyway, let's talk about the city. It was founded by the Romans during the Cantabrian Wars (around 20 BC), the final stages of the Roman conquest of Iberia. Thus, it's name derives from the Latin word ''Legio'' (legion). It was also the capital of the Kingdom of León in the Middle Ages.

Population: 36 065

'Más' means 'more' and 'Palomas' means 'pigeons', so this town in the Canary Islands has a name that means 'MorePigeons' or something like that ('mas' without the accent is a synonim of `pero' which means 'but', so it could also be ''translated'' as 'ButPigeons'). So, is there really nothing but pigeons here?

It is actually a mostly tourist-oriented coastal town in the island of Gran Canaria. It also has a desert nearby

There are many theories about the name's actual origin, but there is not much evidence to prove any of them.

Population: 232 208

This is the largest city on this list and most of you have probably heard about it, or at least about its major sight, the Alhambra or about it being the capital of the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, ruled by the Nasrid dynasty, and which was only conquered in 1492 after being a tributary state to Castile since 1246.

The name translates to either 'Grenade' or 'Pomegranate' (isn't the Spanish language fun?) and is also where the Caribbean country of Grenada (called Granada in Spanish) gets its name.

- Barcarrota, Extremadura ('Broken Boat')

- Guarromán, Andalucía (Guarro means 'dirty')

- Villapene, Galicia ('Penisville')

- Rueda, Castilla y León ('Wheel')

- Caravaca de la Cruz, Murcia ('HeadCow of the Cross')

- Consuegra, Castilla-La Mancha ('Mother-in-Law')

- Uncastillo, Aragón ('ACastle')

- Andorra, Cataluña (I think this one is self-explanatory)

- Colinas del Campo de Martín Moro Toledano de Castilla y León, Castilla y León (longest name out of any town in Spain. It has 50 characters.)

So, there you have it, those are 10 place names in Spain that I find interesting.

I'm planning on doing more blogs like this in the future, but I don't know when the next one will be published.

Hope you enjoyed this one!