In Spain, a region is a territorial division.
A region is a region that differs from the rest due to its historical, social, cultural or geographical characteristics. In some countries, regions are administrative entities made up of several municipalities.
The delimitation of a region can be due to different reasons and interests. In general, the goal is for the delimited territory to have its own identity , in which its inhabitants recognize themselves.
The regions in Spain
In Spain , the regions are territorial divisions that only in some autonomous communities have legal status. It is possible to find more than a hundred regions with legal existence in Galicia , Aragon , Catalonia and other communities .
The region of La Coruña , for example, is located in the northwest of Galicia and is made up of nine municipalities: Sada , Oleiros , Culleredo , Cambre , Arteijo , Carral , Bergondo , Abegondo and La Coruña . Nearly 400,000 people are distributed over an area of 470.7 square kilometers in this Spanish region.
The Alcalá region , on the other hand, has no formal or legal delimitation. It is located in the Community of Madrid and has Alcalá de Henares as its head . Almost 800,000 inhabitants live in this region that includes 45 municipalities.
JRR Tolkien included a fictional territory known as The Shire in "The Lord of the Rings."
The term in Tolkien's work
In the field of fiction, regions also appear. JRR Tolkien , in “The Lord of the Rings” , created a territory known in our language as The Shire (or The Shire , in the original text), which is located in the region of Eriador , in the northwest of Middle-earth . This fictional region, in the universe devised by Tolkien , has an area of 55,000 square kilometers.
The only inhabitants of The Shire are the hobbits , a race that is related to ours although it is characterized by its short stature. Its known history is scarce and, given that hobbits are very peaceful beings, no events of great importance have taken place in it, except for the events of the War of the Ring (a war conflict in which two sides oppose each other to take control of the One Ring ).
The etymology of region
Regarding the etymology of the term comarca , the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy indicates that its origin is found in the combination of the word brand with the prefix co- . Although this may seem evident given that neither of the two parts has undergone any modification, neither orthographic nor phonetic, the semantic evolution of comarca is of a non-negligible complexity, and the use that it is currently given in Spanish territory is quite recent.
In its beginnings, the meaning of the word region was the same as border , that is, "a space that is on the limit between two territories", and this was due to the original definition of brand , which referred to "a signal or an edge limit. So much so that even today it is correct to use the verb comarcar to denote the action of "confine" or "limit", as well as the adjective comarcano with the meaning of "adjacent".
Evolution of the notion
Although there are many quotes in which this term appears in reference to the space that is around a certain place or the one in which it is inserted, old dictionaries define it as "a border territory." In this way, the Dictionary of Authorities of 1729 assigns it the meaning of "country close to a place or territory, which is located in its surroundings."
The Dictionary of Geographic Spanish Voices , published in 1796 by the Royal Academy of History , gives the region this same meaning, since it defines it as a "contour district ." On the other hand, two decades earlier, the Royal Spanish Academy itself had defined this term as "territory comprised of a town and its entire surroundings"; Only in 1832 was it given the meaning that remains to this day, "a territory divided into several towns."