Mérida

BadajozExtremadura

Here Vía de la Plata and Camino Mozárabe converge. It is one of the points where the pilgrim shares the way with those arriving by another route.

From the Latin Emerita Augusta = 'the emeriti of Augustus': a city founded in 25 BC by Emperor Augustus to settle the emeriti, the discharged veterans (emeritus = 'one who has completed service') of the V Alaudae and X Gemina legions.

The underlying personal name is Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who in 25 BC ordered the city's founding as capital of the new province of Lusitania. The name, Emerita Augusta, combines the participle emerita (substantivised feminine plural of emeritus, 'one who has completed military service', the same root as mérito and merecer) with the emperor's dynastic name. Veterans discharged with honours received land, houses and Roman citizenship — privileges designed to create a loyal provincial capital in the western Peninsula. The city came to be the Rome of Hispania: amphitheatre for 16,000 people, theatre for 6,000 (intact, still used for classical festivals every summer), circus, forum, the Milagros and San Lázaro aqueducts, a 792-metre bridge over the Guadiana. The fall of the empire left the city in Visigothic hands; in 713 the Arabs took it and called it Marida, with typical elision of the Latin initial e. The 13th-century Christian reconquest recovered the form Mérida, close to the original Latin but passed through Arabic.

Evolution of the name

Emerita Augusta Latin (colonia romana) 25 BC — 5th century
Marida (ماردة) Andalusi Arabic 8th — 13th century
Mérida Castilian from the 13th century

Reflections, to the letter

Attend a performance of the International Classical Theatre Festival at the Roman Theatre between July and August. The building you walk on was inaugurated in 16 BC, and the veterans of the V Alaudae and X Gemina legions to whom the city owes its name sat on the same tiers. Then cross the Roman Bridge over the Guadiana, 792 metres of road with 60 arches, still bearing pedestrian traffic two thousand years later. Mérida is the city of the Camino where you can most exactly live the etymology: you walk through the emeriti, the discharged veterans, treading on what they built.

Glossary

Anthroponym: A personal name, often used as the base of toponyms (Lucronius → Logroño, Sigerici → Castrojeriz, Sacavus → Sacavém).
Elision: Suppression of an unstressed vowel or syllable in the evolution of a word. The paradigmatic case is compressed hagiotoponyms: Sanctus Zoilus → Sansol, Sancti Emeterii → Santander.
Etymology: The origin and history of a word and the phonetic and semantic changes it has undergone. An etymology may be confirmed, probable or disputed depending on documentary attestations and linguistic parallels.
Roman road: A stone-paved Roman highway, part of the imperial communications network (Via Aquitana, Via Augusta, Iter ab Asturica); many such roads became medieval routes and, later, stretches of the Camino de Santiago.
Substantivised plural: A device by which an adjective or noun in the plural is fixed as a place name without the noun that governed it: fontanas = "[lands of the] springs", ferreiros = "[place of the] smiths". Frequent in medieval repopulation.

Sources

Mateos Cruz, P. — Augusta Emerita: la investigación arqueológica (Mérida: Consorcio, 2001)
Estrabón — Geographia, III, 2, 15

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Vía de la Plata

Evolution of the name

Reflections, to the letter

Languages of origin

Themes

Origin status

Glossary

Sources