My most popular blog is “Towns Named Aberdeen”. Why this is so mystifies me. I have a geographic mind, so further blogs about town names is a natural subject for me if people are interested, and they seem to be. As a result, I have done a series of essays, actually 11 in number, on town names using common repeats like Burlington, Richmond, and Clinton. It occurred to me recently that names like Alexandria recur in the world, and I began to wonder what the most common world town name is. The answer appeared to be San Jose, so I did research followed by a blog. The 10th most common town name in the world according to Quora is La Esperanza. “How can a town and city name I have not heard of be the 10th most common?” I asked myself.
Research began because Quora said there are 852 La Esperanzas in the world. I learned that this word means “hope” in Spanish and that Quora, an information source founded by 2 former Facebook employees is 11 years old, was valued at 2 billion dollars last year, and is somehow linked to Wikipedia. I learned that when I clicked on a question I asked on the internet, like “What are the most common city names in the world-Quora” I found a list beginning with San Jose. La Esperanza was #10.
I checked other sources looking for La Esperanzas. Geodatos.com, whose domain name is for sale, listed 15 La Esperanzas–5 in Mexico, 1 in Cuba, 1 in the Dominican Republic, 1 in Puerto Rico, 1 in Argentina, and 6 in The Philippines. I had learned previous to this that La Esperanza is the capital city of Honduras in Central America and that there is a La Esperanza in Peru. The one in Honduras has a population of about 13,000 and the one in Peru has about 1,250 residents. Another website listed 22 La Esperanzas with 14 of them in Mexico. Geotargit.com says, “There are 171 places in the world named La Esperanza.” It showed 28 of them in Columbia and 26 in Mexico. This is 681 less than 852, so I am confused.
I concluded that the information explosion on the internet has gotten too big to handle. One entry I made was followed by 17 pages of choices about places called La Esperanza.
Hank
