Portugal name

The toponym " Portugal " comes from the Latin name of the settlement Portus Cale (literally: "Port Calais"), located at the mouth of the Duero River, currently part of the Greater Porto agglomeration. Around 200 BC, when the Romans defeated Carthage in the Second Punic War , they occupied the village of Calais and renamed it Portus Cale. In the 4th – 8th centuries, the area around the village was part of the Suevi kingdom , and then the Visigoth kingdom called Portucale . In the 7th – 8th centuries, the name Portucale was transformed into Portugale , and in the 9th century this toponym was widely used to denote the area between the Douro and Migno rivers, Migno flowing along the modern northern border of Portugal with Spain . In the XI-XII centuries, the toponym Portugale took the form of Portugal .

As for the etymology of the name of the village of Kale, its meaning is not exactly clarified, although it was suggested that it was of Celtic origin ^[1] , like many other toponyms in this region. The word "Kale" in the Celtic language means "port", "entrance" or "harbor", which indicates the existence of an ancient Celtic port in this place ^[2] . This hypothesis is supported by the fact that in Gaelic the word “harbor” sounds like “cala” ^[3] . Another theory claims that the word "Kale" comes from the word Caladunum ^[4] .

Undoubtedly, the prefix Portu in the word Portucale comes from the base of Porto - this is the modern name of the city located on the site of the ancient city of Calais at the mouth of the Duero River. In English, and subsequently in other languages, this word entered through the name of the wine , meaning "wine from the Duero Valley" located around Porto.