The essential link between landscape and place names: the case of the municipality names in northern Valencia

Abstract

The semantic content of place names often refers, more or less, to natural features of landscapes (mountains, valleys, springs, rivers, crops, plants, animals) and sometimes refers to a particular historical context (type of settlement, defensive buildings, laudatory epithets, names of a saint, etc.). In this paper we focus on the study of the names describing landscape features and we analyze the essential link between landscape and place names. Our region of study are El Maestrat and Els Ports in northern Valencia and the type of place names that we analyze are the ones designing a municipality, because these kind of names have a solid historical foundation and, also, they are well known by placenames
scholars.

Key words: landscape, place names, El Maestrat, Els Ports.