One of the many ‘pueblas’, along with the ‘póvoas’, ‘pobras’, ‘pruobas’, ‘polas’, “puelas”, ‘poblas’, etc., which are scattered throughout Spanish and Portuguese territory. A puebla (póvoa, pobra, pruoba, pola, puela, pobla…) was mainly a legal instrument that brought together a series of privileges, granted to facilitate the appearance or organisation of new population centres and which, for this reason, became an excellent toponymic reference. It is, moreover, a characteristically Hispanic term typical of Ibero-Romanesque toponymy, as there is no similar toponymic element in other Romanesque domains Vid. García Sánchez, Jairo Javier. “POPULA. As Riesco Chueca (396-397) explains, Sanabria is pre-Roman, with a second well-studied element, the Celtic *brig- “hillock, fortified height”, which presents variants -bre, -bria, -bra, -bris, -brix in a large part of Indo-Europeanised Hispania. Its Germanic cognates are berg “mountain”, burg “fortified city”. It is a base which has its origin in the Indo-European *bheregh– “high, elevated”, also present in the name of ancient Bergantia, nowadays port. Bragança -esp. Braganza-. In the toponymy of the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula it is always applied to ancient fortified forts. The first component also seems to be of Celtic origin: *sen– “old”, from the Indo-European *sen(o).

Cited bibliography: 

-García Sánchez, Jairo Javier. “*POPULA.” En Toponimia de las zonas central, sur e insular atlántica (PID2020-114216RB-C66), proyecto integrado en el Toponomasticon Hispaniae, financiado por el MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Disponible en línea: <https://toponhisp.org/es/etimo/popula>

-Riesco Chueca, Pascual. Toponimia de la provincia de Zamora. Panorámica documental, comparativa y descriptiva. Zamora: Diputación de Zamora, Instituto de Estudios Zamoranos “Florián de Ocampo”, 2018.