A Coruña

A Coruña (Galician: [a koˈɾuɲa] official name, Spanish: La Coruña pronounced: [la koˈɾuɲa], English: Corunna) is a city and municipality of Galicia, Spain. It is the second-largest city in the autonomous community and seventeenth overall in the country. The city is the provincial capital of the province of the same name, having also served as political capital of the Kingdom of Galicia from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and as a regional administrative centre between 1833 and 1982, before being replaced by Santiago de Compostela.

A Coruña is a busy port located on a promontory in the entrance of an estuary in a large gulf (the Portus Magnus Artabrorum of the classical geographers) on the Atlantic Ocean. It provides a distribution point for agricultural goods from the region.

Name

In English, use of the Spanish or Galician forms now predominates. However, the traditional form Corunna /kəˈrʌnə/ can still be found, particularly in reference to the Battle of Corunna in the Peninsular War. Archaically, the city was known as The Groyne, probably from French "La Corogne", although this name could also be as much a geographical description given the city occupies a small peninsula protruding out into the Atlantic. In Spain, currently the only official form of the name is the Galician one, "A Coruña". Nonetheless, the Spanish form, La Coruña, is still widespread, and it is the traditional name in Spanish recommended by the Real Academia Española for texts in Spanish. Certain groups of people have advocated elevating the reintegrationist spelling "A Corunha" to official status, pointing to the provisions of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and claiming that it is unconstitutional to stipulate use of the Real Academia Galega spelling, but have not been successful so far.