Monforte de Lemos

The name joins a hill and a people. Monforte, from the Latin Mons Fortis, 'strong mount', is the hill of San Vicente do Pino that dominates the town, crowned by the keep of the counts' castle: a mount made to defend, and defended. Lemos, by contrast, comes from long before Rome: it is the name of the lemavi, a Galician people who named the whole district, the Terra de Lemos. The sense of their pre-Roman ethnonym is debated: some tie it to a Celtic root for 'elm', *lēmo-; others to an Indo-European base for the 'damp, fertile', which would fit the valley floor of the river Cabe where the town sits. What is not debated is its age: Lemos is among the names that were already here when the legions arrived.