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The old town of Salobreña sits up high on a hill SUR
Salobreña: a strategic island abundant with salt
THE STORY BEHIND A PLACE NAME

Salobreña: a strategic island abundant with salt

The first written evidence of the name Salobreña dates back to a Phoenician settlement called Selambina; the union of Sel and Ambina

Jennie Rhodes

Friday, 2 June 2023

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According to the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish academy) Salobreña refers to a piece of land that is "brackish or contains an abundance of salt".

The seaside town of Salobreña is located in the south of the province of Granada, between the towns of Motril and Almuñécar to the east and west respectively.

According to Manuel Márquez Cruz, a Latin Lexicographer at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in his thesis 'Sobre el término Salobreña' (about the term Salobreña) the first mention of the name comes from the Phoenician period and a settlement called Selambina.

Márquez Cruz also discusses an important connection with salt saying that especially from the town's Punic and Roman eras there is evidence "indicating the activities of a salting factory. As for the name Salobreña, Márquez Cruz explains that Müller, cited in J.L. García Alonso's paper, La Península Ibérica el Geografía de Claudio Ptolomeo, suggests that it was formed from the union of two forms 'sel' and 'ambina'.

Sel came from the old Indo-European word for sal (salt) and is related to the proximity of the sea. Márquez Cruz goes on to give the proposed definitions of 'stream of water', 'sea' and 'salt'. "It is also true that there was a salting factory in the area of El Peñón in the Augustan period", he explains.

Ambina or, possibly Ambisna, would have its origins in the Indo-European word 'mobhi', meaning 'around'. "The ambiguity of the term leads us to propose also a Gaelic-Irish origin ambi-(s)na, with a suffix (s)na which is a form of Old Irish used with some frequency to refer to abstract names, and which is related to the word Ambisna, meaning 'enclosed place' or 'dam'.

By the twelfth century AD, the pronunciation had changed, giving rise to the word Xalubi-niya and three centuries later it undergoes two new linguistic evolution: the first 'i' becomes an 'a' sound and then the 'iy' becomes one phoneme.

The final transformation, Márquez Cruz explains, takes place after the Reconquista around the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century when the name Salobreña is the product of a final vowel change.

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