The project

Mapa De Apellidos was born from the inspiration of the MappaDeiCognomi.it project and was developed with the same purpose: to satisfy the curiosity of anyone looking for the distribution of surnames across Spanish territory.

A surname carries a sense of belonging to a family that includes all of its ancestors. Discovering where it is most widespread, whether it comes from several distinct branches or, on the contrary, how rare it is: these are all details that help satisfy the curiosity about a word which is assigned at birth and stays with us for a lifetime.

Data source

The surname maps are the result of processing a collection of more than 14 million records. Mapa De Apellidos is the outcome of enormous and meticulous work based on the telephone directories of the 1990s.

The result therefore does not include the changes that have occurred since the beginning of the new century, nor the households that did not own a telephone.

Despite these limitations, the result still serves the purpose of the project. Today people have moved to mobile networks, so more recent databases have become poorer. Besides, searching for the origins of one's own surname is one of the cornerstones of this project, and it fits better with the choice of using historical rather than current data.