Renaming Madrid: 16 variants and no real alternative

Madrid now has 16 new names and not one of them is a new name

Someone opens a list and rattles off sixteen names without pausing for breath. Madrizuela. Madraguay. Madrivia. Madrinicana. Madrilombia. Madribamba. Madriquito. Then the trick is turned on its head: Bogodrid, Limadrid, Guayadrid, Guatemadrid, Panamadrid, Guanajuadrid, Mededrid. Sixteen variants in a single message, all cut from the same pattern: the root of Spain's capital with half a continent glued on behind it. The question closes the move: "which one do you pick?". Four days later the count tops twenty suggestions, and not one is simply called something else.

A place name that arrives late to its own city

The exercise is only funny if you accept its premise: that Madrid no longer resembles what its name promises, and that toponymy is the last thing left to update. It is not a new thesis, but what is new is the casualness with which it is taken for granted. Nobody proposes rescuing an old place name or digging into local history. What is proposed is grafting: sticking a foreign surname onto a root that stays intact.

The reverse hybrids point to the same thing. When the joke shifts from "Madrid + country" to "Latin American capital + drid", it is no longer about arrival but about brand export. Madrid as a format, not as a place. The MadriDF variant finishes it off the Mexican way: adopting the naming convention of the Distrito Federal for a city that has spent years behaving like one without saying so.

Burgos and the joke that was not a joke

Among the more than twenty suggestions, two break the pattern. One answers with the name of a Castilian city, hinting that perhaps what is surplus is not the place name but the entire capital. Another shifts the game to the north, taking for granted that the mechanism —the people who used to live here no longer do— can be replicated region by region.

One uncomfortable fact remains. Of all the suggestions recorded, only one abandons the root, and it is not a new name: it is that of another city that already exists. The rest are Madrid with something stuck on. Twenty ways of debating the name and not one that dares to think it up from scratch.