Land of rabbits 🐰 and the canoe 🛶 How some of our favourite holiday destinations got their names
has one of the more curious meanings of any country, dating back to the time of the Phoenicians.
Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula around 1,000 BC, said Phoenicians were met with an unexpected sight – millions of rabbits running rampant across the landscape. Never having seen such critters before, they assumed them to be a type of hyrax,A wild rabbit in Sierra Mariola natural park in Bocairent, Valencia
And yes, the Phonicians assumed, wrongly of course, that they had landed on an island rather than the peninsula of Iberia. Despite the strange circumstances that inspired it, the empires and cultures that followed the Phoenicians stuck with their name, adapting it along the way until the Romans were usings name in the annals of history, at least according to its most popular folk etymology.
Rather poetically, the Senegalese have embraced this theory and adopted it as a kind of national mantra: “we’re all in the same boat” , aptly demonstrating the power a story can have to bring people together.
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