Conversation in a Barcelona market between an elderly lady customer and a middle-aged male fishmonger who used to be an electrician and still serves up overpriced death:

--Those rock mussels?
--Yep, delicious they are.
--Where they from?
--Ebro.
--Ain't no rocks in the Ebro.

The distinction is between Mytilus galloprovincialis, the Mediterranean or rock mussel, and Mytilus edulis, the bigger and cheaper Atlantic or Cantabrian mussel. A fucking hilarious Menorcan folk taxonomy distinguishes between musclos de roca and musclos de bastiment, rock and construction muscles. In English, as in Romance languages, the root is the same--Latin mūsculus--although the route is different.

I believe that in Spanish modifiers (de roca, del Mediterráneo, etc) were generally applied first in the 1950s on the back of improved canning and refrigeration techniques, prior to which people just ate whatever grew near them or died in agony.

An exception to this is the Spanish shellfish and birdshit settlement on the Chilean-Bolivian border which was known first as Mejillones de Bolivia and later, after the Guano and Saltpetre War involving the two republics and Peru (1879-83), as Mejillones de Chile. This may for all I know demonstrate the flexibility of Stigler's law of eponymy: it should surely be called Mejillones de España.

Tags (experimental automated caching of WP extracts):

• Atlantic mussel (1)
• Barcelona (881)
• Bolivia (2) Prior to European colonization, the Andean region of Bolivia was a part of the Inca Empire – the largest state in Pre-Columbian America.
• Cantabrian mussel (1)
• Catalan language (46) Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian, as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island of Sardinia.
• Catalonia (998)
• Chile (2) Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow strip of land between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.
• Ebro (2)
• English language (121)
• Etymology (28)
• Guerra del Pacífico (1) The War of the Pacific took place in western South America from 1879 through 1883.
• Mediterranean mussel (1) The Mediterranean mussel is a species of bivalve, a marine mollusc in the family Mytilidae.
• Mediterranean Sea (73) The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant.
• Mejillón Atlántico (1)
• Mejillón Cantábrico (1)
• Mejillón de roca (1)
• Mejillón del Norte (1)
• Mejillón Mediterráneo (1)
• Musclo de roca (1)
• Rock mussel (1)
• Seafood (1)
• Spain (1423)
• Spanish language (160)
• War of the Pacific (1) The War of the Pacific took place in western South America from 1879 through 1883.

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