We live in spectacular mountain scenery here in Marina Baixa, in the province of Alicante, south-eastern Spain. It is more than eight years since I moved my donkeys here to ‘El Parral’ which is just at the end of the Jurassic spine of Castallets, down there in the shadows in the lower right-hand side of the photo.
In the distance is San Juan and Alicante. In 1939 a man flew out of Alicante and into exile in Argentina at the end of the Spanish civil war. His last sight of Alicante home territory was the tallest mountain chain: the Sierra Aitana.
In 2011, while teaching in Costa Blanca College in Benidorm, I was aware that Aitana was a popular name for girls and I assumed it had always been a traditional Alicante girls’ name. So when my second donkey foal was born on 2nd October 2011 (the day after my first foal, Morris), I named her Aitana, as we lived in the valley below Finestrat and she was born within sight of this high mountain.
One of the top Spanish footballers in the women’s team is Aitana Bonmatí: so the name is becoming more popular than ever, internationally. Today in Información de Alicante the origin of the name is explained; not only the geographical origin – the Sierra Aitana – which everyone in Alicante knows, but how it came to be a girls’ name starting in 1968. Today in the Spanish statistical records there are 34,053 women named Aitana, and the average age is 12, showing how popularity of the name is very recent.
In fact, the very first Aitana is identified as the daughter of María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti, the man who flew into exile from Alicante in 1939 – as the civil war was won by Franco’s forces – and the last thing he saw of his home territory was the tallest mountains of the Sierra Aitana, so he treasured that name as an exile.
Many years later when a daughter was born in 1968 the parents named her Aitana after that last glimpse of the mountains of home. She became a well known actress and celebrity in Spain, as Aitana Sánchez Gijón, and it was she who popularised the name as a girls’ name for future generations of Aitanas.
Aitana Sánchez Gijón at the Goya awards
Aitana had a poem written about her naming, by her poet father Rafael Alberti:
Aitana, niña nueva
A Aitana, niña nueva
Aitana, niña Aitana, baja la primavera
para ti quince flores pequeñas y graciosas.
Sigues siendo de aire, siguen todas tus cosas
siendo como encantadas por una luz ligera.
Aitana, niña Aitana, fuera yo quien moviera
para ti eternamente las auras más dichosas,
quien peinara más luces y alisara más rosas
en tus pequeñas alas de brisa mensajera.
Aitana, niña Aitana, ya que eres aire y eres
como el aire y remontas el aire como quieres,
feliz, callada y ciega y sola en tu alegría,
aunque para tus alas yo te abriera más cielo,
no olvides que hasta puede deshojarse en un vuelo
el aire, niña Aitana, Aitana, niña mía.
– Rafael Alberti
My donkey Aitana… with Morris
There you have it. Aitana is a very modern girls’ name, but the girls called Aitana are not named after my donkey, who still wears a Santa hat with panache. And Morris is miffed because he isn’t named after a mountain.