Loyola

Matt Cox had to get creative in researching the town of Loyola, Spain.

In his final paper that accompanied his slides, he writes: "Saint Ignatius is the only thing that ever really happened to this place, or at least the only thing I could really find except for almost the same paragraph just worded differently on a few different websites."

Besides seeing the same paragraph describing the founder of the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, Matt's searches kept leading him to Loyola schools. His frustration continued: "... My favorite was a Wikipedia page that talked all about a fake car company that was located in Loyola called the Loyola Group and that it had a car that happened to be Franco's favorite." Is this a myth?

Since this class is taught in English students are not expected to know Spanish, or any of the other languages spoken on the Iberian Peninsula. Matt used an internet translator to read articles on the Web in Spanish and in Basque about Loyola but most of the sentences "didn't make sense."

Another discovery was that Loyola comes from the word "lohi" in the Basque language, which means clay or mud. It makes sense when you realize that there is a river that runs through the town.