When walking near Faro I saw this road sign pointing towards Montenegro, which briefly confused me, as I had not expected to stumble across the Balkans quite so close to the airport. I was fairly sure that I had not accidentally walked from Portugal to the Adriatic, although given the heat I wasn’t ruling out mild hallucination. Have I mentioned that it was hot?
The explanation is obvious once I actually thought about the name, which is always slightly annoying in retrospect. Montenegro simply means “black mountain” or “dark mountain”, from ‘monte’ and ‘negro’. The country of Montenegro has a similar meaning, linked to the dark forested slopes of Mount Lovćen, while the Faro place name is said to come from a dark or densely wooded hill visible from the city. So this was not Portugal randomly borrowing the name of another country, but two places using the same fairly practical description. Sometimes a hill is dark, and people decide not to over-complicate matters.
There is something pleasing about these repeated place names, especially when they momentarily make a road sign look more exotic than it really is. For some reason I thought that there might be something more complex about this whole arrangement, but it was all quite logical.