The BNG says that 'Orense does not exist' but on its website it says 'Castela e León' and 'A Rioxa'

Yesterday, all Spaniards were able to witness an exhibition of the linguistic fanaticism of Galician separatism in the Senate.

The separatists lie: Galicia's toponyms in Spanish are not illegal
Place names in Spanish in Galicia, Hispanophobia, and trash journalism

This display occurred during an appearance by the third vice president of the government and Minister of Ecological Transition, socialist Sara Aagesen, to discuss the fires that have devastated several Spanish regions, including Galicia. BNG senator María Carme da Silva scolded the minister for using the place name "Orense," stating that "Orense does not exist." No, it's not a joke. Here you can hear the separatist senator uttering this mixture of ignorance and ideological fanaticism:

Decir que "Orense no existe" es una estupidez tan colosal como decir "Polonia no existe" (el nombre oficial es Polska) o "Finlandia no existe" (es Suomi). Los fanáticos del BNG están dispuestos a decir cualquier burrada para borrar el español en Galicia.pic.twitter.com/ykrJxEbPnh

— Elentir (@elentirvigo) August 27, 2025

In fact, the place name "Orense" has existed since medieval times. As I already explained here, it is a derivative in Spanish of the Latin name "Auriensis Ciuitatis" which appears in the city's charter, granted in 1122. In fact, in the censuses carried out from 1984 to 1981, "Orense" appeared as the name of that Galician province. Currently, that Spanish toponym still appears in the Statute of Autonomy of Galicia, since it has not been modified since its approval in 1981. Even the Spanish version of the Statute published on the website of the Xunta de Galicia says "Orense" as the name of one of the four Galician provinces (the first mentioned, by the way, is "La Coruña").

What was seen yesterday in the Senate is yet another example of the linguistic fanaticism of Galician separatism, an extremist political movement that does not tolerate the existence of the Spanish language in Galicia because it hinders its ultra-nationalist project to turn this Spanish region into an independent, monolingual republic, something that Galicia has never been. Galician and Spanish have been spoken in Galicia since the Middle Ages, and it is normal for the forms of place names to be in both languages, since any bilingual territory usually has bilingual ways of referring to the places. What is abnormal is that a region with two official languages ​​only recognizes place names in one of its languages, but this abnormality is not only attributable to the BNG: the Popular Party and the PSOE have also contributed to this nonsense.

For anyone with at least two functioning brain cells, saying that "Orense doesn't exist" is as colossal a stupidity as saying "Poland doesn't exist" (its official name is Polska) or "Finland doesn't exist" (it's Suomi). BNG fanatics are willing to say anything to erase Spanish in Galicia, including denying the existence of Spanish place names in this Spanish region.

Furthermore, it should be noted that in linguistic matters, the BNG systematically applies the law of the funnel, appealing to official names when it suits them and ignoring them when they bother them. In fact, the BNG always refers as "Galiza" to this Spanish community, which is called "Galicia" in its Statute of Autonomy, both in the Galician version and in the Spanish version.

The inconsistency of the BNG also applies to other Spanish communities. For example, on the BNG website there are dozens of references to "Castela e León", "Estremadura", "Castela-A Mancha" and "A Rioxa", despite the official names of those Spanish communities are "Castilla y León", "Extremadura", "Castilla-La Mancha" and "La Rioja", in Spanish. Obviously, the BNG does this because its website is in Galician and when using this language it is normal to use place names in Galician, even though the official place names are in another language.

Curiously, this very basic linguistic rule is what the BNG does not tolerate in the case of Spanish, trying to impose Galician place names on a language other than Galician and against the criteria of the Royal Spanish Academy, which reminds us that "in texts written in Castilian, the Castilian place name must be used".

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Image: Instituto Geográfico Nacional. Map of Galicia from 1849 with the place name "Orense" and other Spanish place names that have been excluded from official toponymy simply because they are in Spanish.