López

Lope was a Spanish given name taken from the Latin lupus, wolf, and López is its patronymic: son of Lope. The suffix goes back to the Visigothic period, when the peninsula largely adopted a system fixing the Latin genitive -ici, son of, to the father's forename. As the languages separated, so did the ending: a son of Fernando was Fernández in Castilian, Fernanditz in Basque, Ferrandis in Catalan, Fernandes in Portuguese and Galician. Lope ran the same course, which is why one man's son is López in Castile, Lopes in Galicia, Llopis in Valencia and Otxo in Basque, with Lupo, Loup and Lupu answering it in Italy, France and Romania.

The system was most at home in central Castile, though never confined to it; Catalonia kept the bare patronymic with no suffix at all. Not every name ending in -ez is one: because z and s sound alike in American Spanish, Chávez, Cortez and Valdez are respellings of Chaves, Cortés and Valdés. López is not one of those. There was a Lope behind it.

While the system was live, a patronymic lasted one generation. Medieval Spain worked as the record describes: Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez, but Álvaro's own son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez, he was Juan Álvarez. A López in that world was one particular man's son and nothing else, and his children carried a name built from his forename instead. Surnames only came into use in western Europe in the 11th century, and the Iberian patronymics hardened out of that habit, not by any single decree.

That hardening is why so few Spanish surnames cover so many people. A patronymic system mints one surname per popular forename, and medieval Iberia used a short list of them. Lope was near the top of it, an animal name a frontier society at permanent war was glad to give a boy. Every Lope with sons started another line of Lópezes, and once the name stopped resetting, all of those unrelated lines kept it. López is now the most common surname of any kind in the province of Lugo.

Because the name was common so early, bearers pinned it to a place. Across most of Álava and some central parts of Navarre, it was normal to join the father's name to the family house or village with the particle de, and the name the sources give as their own example of that formula is Pedro López de Ayala. That was one surname, not a name with an address after it, and Castile used the same device. Where Basque and Romance had long shared ground the pattern joined the patronymic to the family house, so López de Arriortúa is a single surname although Arriortúa is a Basque family name in its own right.

The most consequential man to carry the compound was Íñigo López de Recalde, born in 1491, whom the world knows by another part of his name entirely. He became Ignatius of Loyola, the Catholic saint who founded the Jesuits, and died in 1556. Loyola is a Basque house name meaning the smithy in the mud, from loi and ola, and it has so swallowed the rest that few ever notice the López inside it.

Spanish practice gives every person two surnames, the father's first and the mother's second, and a woman does not change her name when she marries. Colonial Spanish America joined the pair with y, a usage the Ley de Registro Civil of 1870 required on birth certificates, so the legal form of José María Aznar López is Aznar y López, and the Civil Registry Regulations of 1958 fixed at Article 195 when de could be prefixed to a surname. The order was not always the father's: before the mid-18th century families often passed the mother's name down instead. Paternal precedence then held until 1999, when transposition became legal provided every sibling was registered the same way, and since June 2017 parents must agree the order explicitly. The old order is still chosen 99.53 per cent of the time.

The rule has a side effect that shapes how Lópezes are known. When the first surname is very common the second does the identifying, which is how Federico García Lorca became Lorca and Pablo Ruiz Picasso became Picasso. López triggers it constantly, which is why the men in this history are López de Hoyos, López Pumarejo and López Michelsen: the half a Spanish speaker reaches for is the half that is not López.

Juan López de Hoyos was a Spanish humanist and educator, and his pupil was Miguel de Cervantes. Ruy López de Segura was a Spanish priest, and the Ruy López opening still carries his name, a rare immortality for a cleric. Both wear the compound pattern the peninsula used to tell one López from another.

The same construction went aboard ship. Miguel López de Legazpi, 1502 to 1572, and Ruy López de Villalobos are both recorded as Spanish explorers, and García López de Cárdenas as a conquistador.

By the 2014 count, 34.8 per cent of all known bearers lived in Mexico, about one person in 40 and one in 13 in Chiapas. Spain held 10.0 per cent and Guatemala 8.2, at one in 22 and one in 7 in San Marcos, with the United States on 7.3, Colombia 7.1 and Argentina 5.0. Within Spain the name is thickest in Murcia, Galicia, Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia and Asturias.

Those numbers are not a map of Castilian descent, and it matters to say so plainly. Spanish naming customs were extended to the countries under Spanish rule, reaching Hispanic America and the Philippines to differing extents, and the sources go no further than that about how any one family abroad came by the name. The sources are blunt about the harshest version: during the trans-Atlantic slave trade many Africans were given new names by their enslavers. This page follows the route rather than the spelling, so the Lópezes named here are those the sources place in Spain or trace back to it.

The best documented López migration in the sources is the Colombian López family, of primarily Spanish descent from the region of Valencia. Ambrosio López, 1809 to 1897, was the father of Pedro Aquilino López, 1857 to 1935, a businessman and banker, whose son Alfonso López Pumarejo, 1886 to 1959, became the 14th and 16th president of Colombia, in office from 1934 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1945, and ambassador to the United Kingdom and to the United Nations.

His wife, María Michelsen de López, 1890 to 1949, was the first First Lady of Colombia to serve two non-consecutive terms. Their third child, Alfonso López Michelsen, 1913 to 2007, was the 24th president, in office from 1974 to 1978, and before that first governor of Cesar and minister of foreign affairs. His wife Cecilia Caballero de López, 1913 to 2019, was First Lady in her turn, and a relative, Miguel López Pumarejo, 1892 to 1976, was minister of national economy and ambassador to the United States.

Four generations held national and state office, and the family is one of only six to have produced two presidents of Colombia under the same surname, alongside the Santos, Pastrana, Holguín, Ospina and Lleras. It put its people into diplomacy, art, journalism and business as well.

In Spain the name has stayed productive. Antonio López García, born 1936, is a painter and sculptor; Charo López, born 1943, and Sergi López, born 1965, are actors; Francisco Romero López, born 1933, is a bullfighter and Felipe López, born 1977, an Olympic archer. Martín López-Vega is a Spanish writer in the Asturian language.

The two-surname rule keeps the name alive where a single-surname country would lose it. Agustina González López, born 1891, was a writer and artist of the Generation of '27, and López is the name she carried from her mother, in the second slot an English registry would have dropped. López is the most common Spanish surname in the United Kingdom and the fifth most common Hispanic surname in Spain and the United States alike. Every bearer stands at the end of a chain that began when somebody's father was called Lope, the wolf, and a clerk needed a way to say which son he meant.