Castillo

Castillo is the Spanish word for a castle, and it is the same word that names Castile. Castilla is la tierra de los castillos, the land of castles: a frontier so thickly studded with fortresses against the Moors that the country was named for its buildings rather than for a people or a river. Your surname is that building.

As a surname it is topographic: it says where a family lived, not who their father was or what they did for a living. Habitation names come from the settlement a person was tied to, and the classifications list strongholds alongside farms, hamlets and villages. A Castillo family lived at a castle-village, or in the houses gathered under the walls of a fortress, in a country where that was the one landmark for miles that everyone could name.

Nobody living inside a castle-village needs to be called after it, because every neighbour is; the name only starts working at a distance. Medieval movement ran out of the small communities and into the towns, and a new arrival needed something to be called.

That makes Castillo a different kind of name from most standing beside it. Medieval Spain ran on patronymics, and patronymics moved every generation: Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez, but his son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez; he was Juan Álvarez. Castillo never moved. It fixed to a point on the ground: a bearer today points at a place, not at a great-grandfather's first name.

The older, fuller form is del Castillo, still carried as an alias of the name. Del contracts de el, of the, exactly as in Carlos Arturo del Monte, Charles Arthur of the Mountain. That de is the joint in every Spanish toponymic surname, the same joint visible in Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Pedro López de Ayala and Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a pattern common among conquistador names.

It does not prove nobility, whatever a family story may say. In eastern Castile, Álava and western Navarre the de meant no more than from, attached to the place a family had left, and adding your birth village to a common surname was ordinary practice in Castile too. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it picked up a harder second meaning: de was used to signal noble blood and, more pointedly, to head off any suspicion that the bearer was a Jew or a Moor. Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega used it, and so did enough commoners that it settled nothing. In 1958, Article 195 of the Civil Registry Regulations stopped a Spaniard prefixing de to a surname at all.

Spain gives a person two surnames, the father's first and the mother's first, and a woman generally does not change her name at marriage. Because only the leading name is passed on, maternal surnames are steadily squeezed out of a lineage. That a Castillo reached you means the name held first position, birth after birth, for centuries.

It was not always so. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, Spanish-speaking societies often passed the mother's surname down instead, and sometimes gave a child a grandparent's surname that neither parent bore, for the prestige of being taken for gentry, or to flatter a matriarch in hope of inheriting land. A Castillo line can run through the women as readily as the men. The Ley de Registro Civil of 1870 required birth certificates in the Spanish Americas to join both surnames with y; a law of 1999 finally let families choose the order, though the old order is still chosen 99.53 per cent of the time.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492-1581), a Spanish conquistador, is the best-known bearer of the older form. Francisco Castillo Fajardo, Marquis of Villadarias (1642-1716), was a Spanish general; Alonso de Castillo Solórzano (1584-1647) a novelist and playwright.

The name runs hard through Spanish art and letters: José del Castillo (1737-1793), painter; Juan Ignacio González del Castillo (1763-1800), author of comic theatre; Carolina del Castillo Díaz (1867-1933), painter. And the name reaches into the Second Spanish Republic: José Castillo (1901-1936) was a lieutenant of its Assault Guard.

In Spain the name beats the national rate of one in 530 people in Ceuta (1:289), Cantabria (1:302), Andalusia (1:313), Melilla (1:323), Castilla-La Mancha (1:392), La Rioja (1:418), Murcia (1:460) and Aragón (1:473). The list runs from the north coast to the far south rather than clustering in one province, and that is the point: castillo was a feature, not a single village, so unrelated families reached the same name wherever there was a fortress to name them.

By 2014 only 3.4 per cent of the world's Castillos lived in Spain. A quarter were in Mexico, and the name had gone with Spanish rule to Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Panama and the Philippines. In the United States it is commonest in Texas (1:509), New Mexico (1:596) and California (1:857). In Portuguese, the same word and the same name became Castilho.

Follow it back and the road ends at a wall: not a crest or a motto, but a fortress on a hard frontier, with a village at its feet and one man in it known simply as he who came from the castle.