Where the Salazar name comes from

Salazar comes from archaic Basque Sarasaitzu, and the surname is usually glossed as "old farmhouse". Over time Sarasaitzu wore down to Sarasaz and then to the Castilian form Salazar. The name belongs first to a place, the Salazar Valley in Navarra, Spain, and it began appearing as a surname in the Early Middle Ages. A noble family, the Salazars, held a fief in that area around the 10th century.

By the 15th century the name had spread across the Basque Country and was especially common in Biscay. In that period the writer Lope García de Salazar took part in the Reconquista of Cuenca, was granted a fief there and founded a family whose descendants carried the name into the Americas. Salazar is now the 9th most common surname in Ecuador and the 179th in the United States, where the 2010 census counted 152,703 people bearing it.