Torres

Torres is the plural of torre, a tower, from the Latin turris. Not a father's name, not a trade: a place, and in medieval Iberia that place was almost always a defended one. The line between Christian and Muslim Spain was held by towers: the atalayas strung along the frontier, the fortified tower-houses minor nobles raised to hold a stretch of ground, and behind the moving line the bell-towers of new churches in towns that had just changed hands.

A family known as de las Torres took that feature as its name, which is why so many places in Spain and Portugal are called nothing more than Torres. The towns were named for what the families were: the stone that stood up out of the fields and told you who held the ground. The towers are mostly gone. The frontier they marked is remembered in millions of names.

Habitation surnames come from the settlement a person was tied to, but nobody living in a village needs to be called after it, because everyone there is. The name only works at a distance. Medieval migration ran out of the small communities and into the towns, and a new arrival needed something to be called; where he had come from was the readiest answer.

That makes Torres a different class of name from most of those around it. Medieval Spain ran on patronymics, and patronymics moved: Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez, but his son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez, he was Juan Álvarez. Torres never moved. It fixed to a point on the map, which is why a bearer today points at ground rather than at an ancestor's given name.

The full form was de la Torre or de las Torres, and Spanish naming handbooks still use it as their worked example. The particle de is the joint in a toponymic surname, the same joint visible in Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Pedro López de Ayala and Vasco Núñez de Balboa. After a forename it stays lower case, Cunegunda de la Torre; drop the forename and it takes a capital, señora De la Torre.

In eastern Castile, Álava and western Navarre the de meant no more than "from", attached to the village a family had left. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it gained a second meaning: de was added 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 took it up, and so did enough commoners that it proved nothing. In 1958 Spanish law shut the door: a citizen may no longer prefix de to a surname.

Torres is a surname in Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish alike, meaning the same in each, because torre reached all three from one Latin root. A Galician, a Catalan and a Portuguese family could each arrive at it from their own local tower and never be related at all. Galician surnames run especially heavily to local place-names, so the name sits as naturally in the northwest as in Castile.

It left the peninsula in company other than the empire's. In Italy, among other countries, Torres is found as a Sephardic surname: Iberian Jewish families carrying an Iberian place-name out of Spain and Portugal, and keeping it for centuries where torre meant nothing to the neighbours.

Antonio de Torres Jurado, born in Almería on 13 June 1817 and dead there on 19 November 1892, is the reason a classical guitar looks and sounds as it does. Working in Seville from 1852 and in Almería from 1871, he enlarged the body, thinned and arched the soundboard, and braced it with a fan of struts laid out as two isosceles triangles joined at the base. In 1862 he built one with back and sides of papier-mâché to prove the tone came from the soundboard. Most acoustic guitars in use today derive from his designs.

Leonardo Torres Quevedo, born at Molledo in 1852 and dead in Madrid in 1936, worked the other end of Spanish invention. He patented the Telekino radio-control system in 1902 and 1903, and by 1906 was steering the boat Vizcaya around Bilbao harbour from the shore, people aboard, at a range of two kilometres. Between 1911 and 1912 he built El Ajedrecista, a machine that played king-and-rook chess endgames unaided.

Bartolomé de Torres Naharro (1485-1530) carried the name through Spanish letters, and Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930) through Spanish painting.

Luís Vaz de Torres was most likely Galician: crewmen on the expedition that sailed on 21 December 1605 called him a Breton, a word Spanish sailors used for men of the northwest. In 1606 he made the first recorded European navigation of the channel between the Australian mainland and New Guinea, and that channel carries his name still. A reader in Queensland or Auckland has been seeing this surname on charts all their life without knowing it began beside a watchtower on a Spanish frontier.

Torres is the eleventh most common surname in Spain and the fiftieth most common in the United States, and common too in Portugal, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and the Philippines, carried outward with Spanish rule. Traced backwards, the road ends at a tower: usually not a castle, but a squat lookout on a contested border or a tower-house holding a few fields. Somebody was described by it, the description stuck to his children, and it has been travelling ever since.