The Lost Letter R

There is a town in the Extremadura region of Spain, about two hundred miles southwest of Madrid, that spells its name with two letters R. Alburquerque, Spain, sits on a hill under a medieval castle, and it gave its name to the tenth duke who bore its title in the early seventeen hundreds, Francisco Fernández de la Cueva y de la Cueva. In seventeen oh six, the governor of New Mexico, Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, named a new villa after that duke. He wrote the name as San Francisco Xavier de Alburquerque. Two R's. Honoring the viceroy of New Spain who had approved the settlement.

Somewhere between seventeen oh six and the arrival of the railroad in eighteen eighty, the first R disappeared.

The most commonly cited explanation involves a French priest who could not produce the sound in his French accent and simply dropped it. The simplified spelling spread slowly, gathering momentum in official documents and newspapers, until by the time the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway needed to print a station sign, the single-R version had won. One hundred and forty years of inertia followed.

There is a secondary wrinkle. When Governor Cuervo y Valdés petitioned the viceroy for approval of the new villa, the regulations required at least thirty Spanish families to be in residence. Historians believe Cuervo y Valdés inflated his count. The viceroy's auditors were skeptical. The duke for whom the city was named never set foot in the province. He served in Mexico City, governed on paper, and gave his truncated name to a city of five hundred thousand people who have been spelling it wrong ever since.

The city of Alburquerque, Spain, has a population of roughly five thousand. The city that misspelled its name has a population more than a hundred times larger.