Where the Valdez name comes from

Valdez grew out of Valdés, a Spanish surname taken from the municipality of Valdés in Asturias. Medieval documents call the land around the present town of Luarca Val de Ese, the valley of the river Ese, a river known today as the Esva. The name joins valle, meaning valley, and de, meaning of, to the name of that river. The lineage dates to the time of the Reconquista, and in medieval times many families around Luarca took the name. By the 14th century it had spread across the Kingdom of Castile, and later through the whole Iberian Peninsula.

In the Americas the spelling often shifted to Valdez, by analogy with Spanish patronymic surnames ending in -ez. The same respelling happened in the Philippines, where Valdés arrived through the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos and most bearers now write Valdez. In 2014 Valdez was the 33rd most common surname in the Philippines, carried by 132,416 people.