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Tofino on Vancouver Island near Pacific Rim National Park is often thought to be a place name of aboriginal orgin. In fact it honours an early Spanish hydrographer Vicente Tofiño de San Miguel (1732 - 1795). Note the nasalizing accent, called a tilde, over the letter n in Tofino, a dead giveaway that the word is of Spanish provenance. Tofiño was a Spanish surveyor and charter of seas and other bodies of water. Long before becoming Rear Admiral of the Spanish Naval Academy in Cadiz, he had been a mathematics teacher and one of his prize students was Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, who later in his career as a Spanish explorer sailed along the Pacific coast of North America and named Tofino Inlet after his beloved teacher.

A similar story claims that other Spanish explorers did the naming, stating that in 1792 two commanders of the Spanish navy, Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés, explored Canada’s Pacific coast, naming one of the bays into which they sailed Tofino Inlet. They are remembered in the naming of Galiano Island and Valdés Island in the Strait of Georgia

Pacific Rim National Park on the west shore of Vancouver Island, Canada, near the resort village of Tofino.

Quadra Island, British Columbia, and the electoral district Vancouver-Quadra are both named for Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (1743-1794), a Spanish naval officer and explorer who sailed on two voyages up the B.C. coast in 1755 and 1779.

Port Alberni, British Columbia, commemorates Don Pedro de Alberni, founder of a failed Spanish colony at Nootka, B.C.

Juan de Fuca Strait off British Columbia was probably not first seen by Juan de Fuca, who was a Spanish Greek sailor whose real name was Apostolos Valeranos.

This is page two of three. There is one more page of Spanish place names in Canada.

Go to page 1 of Spanish place names in Canada

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