Santiago de Compostela
municipality of Galicia, Spain
Santiago de Compostela, alternatively abbreviated to Santiago or Compostela, is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain. It is located in the province of A Coruña, in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The city has its origin in the shrine of Saint James the Great, now the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, as the destination of the Way of St. James, a leading Catholic pilgrimage route since the 9th century. In 1985, the city's Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Santiago de Compostela has a very mild climate for its latitude with heavy winter rainfall courtesy of its relative proximity to the prevailing winds from Atlantic low-pressure systems.
Toponym
According to Richard A. Fletcher, Joan Coromines, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, now agree that the origin of the name Compostela comes from the Latin compositum tella, meaning a well-ordered burial ground, possibly referring to an ancient burial ground on the site of the Church of Santiago de Compostela that pre-dates the Christian building.
Santiago is the local Galician evolution of Vulgar Latin Sanctus Iacobus "Saint James". According to folk etymology Compostela derives from the Latin: Campus Stellae ('field of the star').
City
According to a medieval legend, the remains of the apostle James, son of Zebedee were brought to Galicia for burial, where they were lost.
“Santiago de Compostela” enters the record as municipality of Galicia, Spain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Santiago, Compostela and municipality can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Santiago de Compostela” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Santiago, Compostela and municipality provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14314. VIAF identifies the subject as 131280231. The Library of Congress control number is n79046621. Authority coordinates are 42.883, -8.533. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Santiago de Compostela” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.