How California Got Its Name From an Island in a Spanish Novel

California is named after a make-believe island in a Spanish adventure novel from the early 1500s, a place ruled by a warrior queen named Calafia. Nobody knows for sure which Spaniard first stuck the name on a real piece of land, but by 1542 it was already showing up in a ship’s journal like everybody knew it.

Where the name comes from

The novel is Las sergas de Esplandián, “The Adventures of Esplandián,” written by a Spaniard remembered as Montalvo. It was a sequel to Amadís de Gaula, a tale of knights in armor that was hugely popular in Spain. Montalvo finished it sometime before 1504, according to Ruth Putnam’s 1917 study of the name, and it’s the first place the word “California” is known to appear in print.

Here’s how the novel introduces it, in Putnam’s translation:

“Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was inhabited by black women without a single man among them, and they lived in the manner of Amazons.”

The island in the book is full of gold, and griffins, and it’s ruled by Queen Calafia, who sails off to fight in a war at Constantinople. It’s pure fantasy. That’s the point.

Would conquistadors really name a place after a novel?

It sounds like a stretch, but there’s evidence these men read this kind of thing. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of the soldiers who marched with Hernán Cortés, remembered that when they first saw the cities built on the water around the Aztec capital, they “said it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis.” That’s the very series Esplandián belongs to.

The name was first used for the southern tip of what we now call Baja California, which the Spanish at first thought was an island. The U.S. Geological Survey’s record for the state says Cortés applied it there in the 1500s and that explorers carried it north from there.

Who named it, and when

As it turns out, the paper trail is thin. Putnam went looking for the first Spanish document that uses the word and found it in the journal of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo’s voyage up the coast in 1542: “Sunday, July 2, we came in sight of California.” The writer drops the name casually, as if it were already well known.

Putnam suspected the name had been tossed onto the peninsula a little earlier, maybe by the crew of Hernando de Alarcón’s 1540 voyage, and maybe as a joke, because the dry land they saw looked nothing like a golden island. She called that an inference, not a fact, and so do we. Twenty years after Cabrillo, a 1562 map by Diego Gutiérrez put “California” on the tip of the peninsula. It’s one of the earliest maps known to show the name.

The person who connected the state to the old novel was the writer Edward Everett Hale, who came across the passage in the 1860s. His idea was accepted, then doubted, but a 1910 review of the evidence by George Davidson and Putnam’s own study both came out on Hale’s side.

The “hot oven” story

There’s an old explanation you’ll still run into: that California comes from the Latin calida fornax, “hot furnace,” because the first Spaniards found the place so hot. It doesn’t hold up. A Jesuit historian, Miguel Venegas, was already skeptical of it in 1757, noting that missionaries had never found the name in any local language and that he doubted the conquistadors had “so much erudition.” Putnam lists several other guesses too, from Arabic words to Caesar’s wife, and none of them has anything like the evidence behind the novel.

California became a state on September 9, 1850, still wearing the name of an island that never existed.

Sources & further reading

• Ruth Putnam with Herbert I. Priestley, California: The Name (University of California, 1917). The main source for this story. Dates the novel before 1504, translates the California passage, quotes Bernal Díaz on Amadís, finds the 1542 Cabrillo journal entry, discusses Alarcón, the 1562 Gutiérrez map, Hale and Davidson, and collects the “hot furnace” and other theories, including Venegas’s 1757 doubts.
• GNIS feature 1779778, California (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record’s history note credits Cortés with first applying the name to the tip of Baja California, says it spread north, ties it to Montalvo’s novel and gives the statehood date, September 9, 1850.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 64. Says the name “is that of an island in an old Spanish romance” and that Cortés applied it to the bay and country he thought was an island.