Saints preserve us.
My postal address is Saint Paris, Ohio.
Regarding Santa Fe:
Rancho Santa Fe, CA
There are absolute scads and scads in Quebec. Just in the island of Montreal are the current or former municipalities of Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Sainte-Geneviève, Saint-Laurent, Saint-Léonard, and Côte-Saint-Luc, and the Sud-Ouest borough alone contains the neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Côte-Saint-Paul, and Pointe-Saint-Charles.
According to the Office de toponymie du Québec, there are 1,417 names for inhabited places in Quebec that include the string “saint”. According to the directory of municipalities of the Quebec ministry of municipal affairs, 515 of the 1,112 municipalities in Quebec contain the string “saint”, including such gems as Saint-Tite (home of the annual Festival Western de Saint-Tite), Saint-Onésime-d’Ixworth, Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, Sainte-Émélie-de-l’Énergie, and Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague-du-Cap-Tourmente (population: 3). A further 28 contain “Notre-Dame”.
Just think, in any of many alternate timelines it could have become the City of La Reina, instead.
This week, I think the better name is probably something like La Ciudad de Los Reyes (please pardon the ungrammatical Spanish, if I didn’t get it right.)
No idea what the reference is to, but the Spanish grammar is perfect.
Texas has several cities & towns named by the missionaries. But our “Santa Fe” in Galveston County was named after the railroad.
In the 19th century, San Saba was named after the San Saba river, near the site of the Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba. Which was created to missionize the Apaches; the Comanches objected. The painting here was on display at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art while its ownership was in dispute; it’s quite impressive, although I doubt the area is really that hilly…
Then, there’sSan Patricio:
Presuming I’m translating right, I’m assuming he’s referencing the fact that LA’s hockey team, the Kings, won the Stanley Cup yesterday.
Santa Clause, the patron saint of grammar.
Santa Fe’ has been mentioned but there are probably at least a 100 wide spots in the road in New Mexico named after Spanish saints. Several duplicated, so it gets pretty confusing. I have no idea how the post office kept it straight before zip codes. Possible that these places had no mail service, and the residents had to go to the nearest bigger town to collect mail I guess. San Ysidro is my favorite for it’s ability to confuse non-locals as to it’s pronunciation. (Saneee-seed-row, with just a skosh of y sound before the long e sound) The Y not followed by a vowel trips up english speakers.
The one near San Diego is often pronounced “San Yuh-seed-row” by English speakers, or it was when I was a kid. I’d go so far as to say that’s the accepted English pronunciation of the place name, which is of course just Saint Isidore.
In the region formerly controlled by Spain and Mexico, I’d think you can find places named for each Apostle as well as most of the other better known saints of the Catholic Church.
Quite a few places were named for the saint on whose feast day they reached a place.
Although it does not follow the rules Corpus Christie seems of similar ilk.
San Diego is an example that it isn’t so simple:
The City of Corpus Christi was founded in the 1840’s by mostly Anglo settlers; of course, it was a pretty simple settlement at the time. But it got its name from its location on Corpus Christi Bay, named by the Spaniards because they discovered it on the Feat of Corpus Christi.
That’s awful long. Can we call it by its acronym? Does EPDNSLRDLADRDP work for you?
They may have done something like what the Spanish train companies did with some town names: they call those towns by a name that’s not used by any other organization and definitely not by the locals.
An example: in Spain there’s a town called Tudela, which is in the province of Navarra, and another one called Tudela de Duero, which is much smaller and in Valladolid. Renfe lists them as Tudela de Duero and Tudela de Navarra, leading many people to think the one in Navarra is actually called “Tudela de Navarra” (it’s not outside Renfe’s signs) or that there are three Tudelas: Tudela de Navarra, Tudela de Duero and “the Tudela that’s famous by its vegetables, which is in Navarra”.