Cáceres

Around 79 BC, during the war against Sertorius, the general Quintus Caecilius Metellus set up the camp of Castra Caecilia nearby (today the site of Cáceres el Viejo). Decades later the Romans founded the colonia Norba Caesarina beside it (around 34 BC, by Gaius Norbanus Flaccus and under Caesar's patronage — Caesarina), but that official city never prospered and was abandoned in the 4th century. What survived instead was the soldiers' everyday word: castra, “camp”, worn down to the ablative plural Castris, “in the camp”, the form that late itineraries —⁠the 4th-century Ravenna one⁠— already record as the name of the place. The Muslims who arrived in 713 inherited it, and the geographer Ibn Hawqal records it as Qazris (قَصْريش). With Alfonso IX's conquest in 1229 that form was Castilianised as Cáceres, which keeps the hard c- of the Latin castra that Arabic had preserved. A curious ending: the city did not inherit the grand name of its colony but the plain word its soldiers used for the camp.