what is Cape Canaveral named after?
” Cape Canaveral refers both to the city of that name (in Brevard county, east central Florida,) and to the geographical phenomenon on which the city rests. This is described by the Encyclopaedia Brittanica as a “…seaward extension of a barrier island”. Most of us know this place, however, as the site of operations for the U.S. space program under NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration.) To answer your question in brief (and there’s a novel idea for mrlucky,) canaveral is Spanish, meaning place of reeds, or cane. Alan Ladwig, writing for space.com, goes into some historical detail: The name Cape Canaveral goes back more than 400 years, when Spanish explorer Juan Ponce De Leon stumbled onto the area in 1513 while searching for the legendary Fountain of Youth. He called the wedge of beach “canaveral” for its abundance of canes and reeds. It wasn’t long before mapmakers began to identify the area as Cabo de Canaveral. Although speculation and development of the area began a
