MAFRA, A PLACE NAME IN SEARCH OF MEANING

[...] To these noble villages submitted It also adds Mafra, in a short space, [...].

The origin and semantics of the place name Mafra is unclear. Not even the different names - Mafarã (1189), Malfora (1199) and Mafora (1288) - that preceded the current form, which Camões was the first to adopt deliberately, seem likely to contribute to thoroughly clarifying the issue.

Some authors have discovered pre-Roman roots, citing hypothetical archaeological remains, such as Santos Ferreira, who derives it from Phoenician, or Batalha Gouveia, who presents it as a result of the Turanic (historical region of central Asia) archetype Mahara, the great Ara, and reminiscent of a female fertility cult that supposedly once existed on the town's outskirts.

Be that as it may, the current explanation, accepted without certainty, in the wake of Friar João de Sousa and refuted in limine by Prof David Lopes, for disobeying both etymology and ancient forms, roots the name in the Arabic Mahfara, the grave, deriving it from the verb hafara, to dig, to open a grave. However, the Dicionário de Cândido de Figueiredo points in the other direction, in which the word Mafra has the pejorative meaning of ordinary people, plebs, a gathering of people, rabble, a semantic value corroborated by Rebelo Gonçalves, who believes it arose during the building work of the Convent of Santo António, in the then outskirts of the town.

Despite everything, the fact that the parchment certifying the donation of Mafra to the diocese of Silves spells Mafara, the toponym used to name the town at the time, is undoubtedly the same as the form that Count Pedro adopted in his Book of Lineages when he named the Couto of the same name located not far from A Coruña (Galicia, Spain).

It therefore remains to be seen what kind of ties they had in common and perhaps survive today in the two regions, since there is a town called Galicia in the municipality of Mafra, precisely in the context of an agricultural property belonging (since the 12th century and until the dawn of the 15th) to the Galician Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Oya, in a territory then geomorphologically similar to a typical Galician estuary, symptomatically called Quinta de Ilhas.

Still, in favour of the aforementioned common identity ties, it should be remembered that various ecclesiastical visitations (1502, 1508 and 1509) expressly report that, from a liturgical point of view, the Church of Santo André de Mafra followed the Compostilian Rite.

So, while the hypotheses that point to the pre-Roman origin of the place name may be considered inconclusive, the one that attributes Arabic origins to it is the least plausible.