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IF YOU'RE in the Comunidad Valenciana any time between now and the early hours of March 20, you may notice an awful lot of noise and colour on the streets. It's the season for the region's biggest festival,...
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THOSE of you who already speak Spanish know this, but those of you who are still learning may not have realised the language has no words of its own beginning with a 'K' or a 'W'.
If you don't believe us, check the dictionary – every entry starting with either letter is of foreign origin. In fact, these letters are barely used at all in any position in Spanish words; the 'K' can be found in some of more modern creation – okupa, or 'squatter', or okupar, 'to squat', uses a 'K' to differentiate it from ocupar, 'to occupy', or its third-person singular conjugation, ocupa; then there's bakalao, which is a type of 1980s' techno music, and the 'K' is so it does not get mixed up with bacalao, which means 'cod'.
By contrast, the letter 'X' is used a lot – taxi, which is self-explanatory, or éxito, meaning 'success' (not 'exit', which is salida), or any other word with an ex- prefix which are instantly recognisable to an English-speaker. Words beginning with 'X' in the Spanish language are similar to those beginning with 'X' in English, such as xenófobo, xenófilo, xilófono, xerografía, which you can probably work out for yourself, although they are much more abundant in the catalán family of languages such as valenciano, ibicuenco, mallorquín, menorquín, and catalán itself, making a 'ch' or 'sh' sound, and in galego, the Galician language, where the 'X' often replaces the 'J' (such as in Xunta, for 'Junta', its regional government) – a tongue which, otherwise, has strong influences of Portuguese.
So, why have you been learning to pronounce 'W' when reciting the alphabet in Spanish, if it isn't used? Well, apart from spelling out names or places in your own language if you need to, or reading out a full website address (www, etc), you'll also see that words 'borrowed' from other languages sometimes use it – indeed, no 'pure' Spanish word does – such as walki-talki, walkman, wadi, and so on.
And you might find it odd that the usual pronunciation of a 'W' in Spanish is as a 'B'. That's because the name of the letter is uve-doble, or 'double-V', and the letters 'B' and 'V' have the same sound as each other in the Spanish language. Either of them comes out as a hard 'B' when at the beginning of a sentence or after a pause or, when found anywhere else, is a much softer sound, midway between a 'B' and a 'V' but, somehow, not really either.
And yet the 'W' sound as we know it in the English language is everywhere in Spanish, just that it uses other letter combinations. The Guardia Civil, for example – pronounced 'wardia'; the province and city of Guadalajara, or any time, in fact, that you find a 'gu' before an 'a'; if it's before an 'i' or an 'e', it's a hard 'G', unless there's an umlaut over the 'u'. Like in bilingüe, where the 'W' sound comes in before the 'e'.
So it stands to reason that there will be no such thing as a town in Spain beginning with a 'K', doesn't it?
Actually, no. The 'K' is used instead of a hard 'C' quite a lot in the Basque language, euskera, so there are four towns in that region where the official title starts with the 11th letter of the alphabet: Karrantza Harana (Valle de Carranza in Castilian Spanish) and Kortezubi, both in the province of Bizkaia, or Biscay, of which the capital is Bilbao, and Kripan and Kuartango, in the province of Álava, the capital of which is Vitoria.
There are, of course, plenty beginning with 'X'. Those whose official names have been in catalán, galego or valenciano for as long as we can remember, and those whose names in these languages and in Spanish are interchangeable or have only recently become regional-language-only – Jalón and Jávea, in the northern Alicante province, were also known alternatively as Xaló and Xàbia, but these are now their only 'proper' names as their councils have opted to drop the Spanish versions beginning with 'J'. Xeresa, Xeraco, Xirivella and Xàtiva in the province of Valencia have not been known by their Castilian Spanish names of Jeresa, Jaraco, Chirivella or Játiva for decades, neither has La Xara, a tied hamlet of Dénia in the province of Alicante, or Alcalà de Xivert, in that of Castellón, been known as La Jara or Alcalá de Chivert for many, many years.
As you'd expect, plenty of towns begin with a Qu or a Y, and a Z – Zaragoza, one of Spain's biggest cities, for one, and Zamora, both of which are provincial capitals. These letters are not at all rare in the language.
What about 'W', then?
There are no towns in the Basque Country beginning with a 'W', and it's not a letter that enters into galego or the catalán-based languages any more than it does into Castilian Spanish.
But there is, in fact, one municipality whose sole and official name starts with 'W', and in a purely Castilian Spanish-speaking region, with no other co-official tongue.
Wamba: Skulls, Visigoths and big paunches
Deep in the rural heart of the province of Valladolid, in the centre-northern region of Castilla y León, in the district or 'mini-county' of Montes Torozos, at 785 metres above sea-level, the only municipality in Spain that begins with a 'W' is home to just 323 people, according to the most recent census, from 2019.
And in keeping with our little pronunciation guide above, even though it's spelt as 'Wamba', the first syllable isn't the same as the band formed by Andrew Ridgeley and the late George Michael; it's not 'Wham-ba', it's 'Bamba'.
The original title may have had several different pronunciations, though. Until the year 672 CE (AD), the village was called Gérticos, but it was re-baptised to take the name of the new monarch. The then King Recceswinth – known as 'Recesvinto' in Spanish – had a villa in Gérticos, and died there; bishops, nobles, generals and other major figureheads debated who should be his successor and it was Saint Leo, claiming God had spoken to him, who said they needed to go searching for a livestock-keeper called Wamba.
Several legends abound as to where the Visigoth King Wamba was born – some place him in the tied hamlet of Santa María de Dozón in what is now Galicia; others claim he came into the world in Pujerra, then called Buxarra, in what we now know as the province of Málaga; others say his origins were in Idanha-a-Velha ('Idanha the Old') within the wider town of Idanha-a-Nova ('Idanha the New'), which was then called Egitânia, a walled town of Roman origin north-east of Castelo Branco in what would not become Portugal for another 500 years.
'Wamba' may not have been the king's real name, although this is the only one he is thought to have been known by. Austrian historian Herwig Wolfram says 'Wamba' means 'big paunch' in the Gothic language, similar to the German word Wampe – pronounced 'vampa' – and from which the English word 'womb' derives. His name was also spelt as Vamba or Vvamba in Mediaeval Latin.
Either way, despite his reign lasting just eight years – after this, he became a monk for the next seven, until his death in 687 – thanks to his being overthrown by an ambitious young rival named Erwig who stole his crown after drugging him to sleep, the name of the Valladolid province town has remained as 'Wamba' for the last 1,349 years.
Part of the world-famous pilgrims' route, the Camino de Santiago, runs through Wamba – the section known as the Camino de Madrid, since it passes Spain's capital – and those who know about this unusually-named village often make a pilgrimage there, too, for somewhat macabre reasons.
Wamba is home to a massive ossuary, inside its Santa María church, which stores over 3,000 disembodied skulls.
They all belonged to monks who lived and died between the 13th and 18th centuries – half a Millennium of bodiless heads stuffed into one single crypt, and which were once attached to the limbs and torsos of members of the Order of San Juan.
One of the ossuary walls bears a grim message – it's not clear when it was written, but whether this was 800 or 300 years ago, its spine-chilling, goosebump-inducing impact remains the same now, in the third decade of the 21st century: “As you see yourself, I also saw myself. As you see me now, you will see yourself. Everyone ends as this. Think about it, and refrain from sinning.”
It's said to be Spain's answer to the globally-famous San Francisco Convent in the Plaza de Armas in Lima, Perú, home to one of the biggest ossuaries on earth and where visitors get a similarly eerie experience of looking down on hundreds or thousands of skulls that belonged to centuries' worth of humans.
On a less Hallowe'en-y note, Wamba's Santa María church itself is definitely worth the detour – it's one of the few in Spain of Mozarab origin.
The Mozarabs, or mozárabes, were Christians of Hispano-Visigoth origin who lived in territories ruled by the Moors, or Arabs of northern Africa, and who had adopted the customs and culture of the mainstream Islamic population, including peppering their spoken language with Arabic words and expressions and generally being fluent in Arabic itself.
Mozarab architecture relates to building designed and constructed by Hispanic Christian communities in the Arabic style – very few ecclesiastical structures are found in Spain in this format, making Wamba's local parish somewhat unique; in fact, its exact date of creation is not clear, with historians believing it to have been somewhere between the 10th and 12th centuries, perhaps of 10th-century origin and with its most recent restorations and additions being up to 200 years later.
Once out of the church, Wamba's countryside is very geared up to a scenic stroll – the village forms part of the Hornija Valley, where the views are spectacular, the air is fresh and clean, and plant-life is lush, abundant. Roadside cafés and restaurants also abound, meaning you can make regular stops to refuel along the main highway towards Valladolid city.
Whilst walking in the Hornija Valley, you're almost certain to catch a glimpse of Torrelobatón's splendid fairytale castle – a beautifully-preserved 13th-century monument in the village of the same name around 12 kilometres from Wamba, and which can be seen from practically anywhere in the valley itself.
Handily, one of the towns bordering Wamba is Villanubla, where Valladolid airport is based, making it easy to find and to reach.
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