La Plata County is named 'the silver' for its mountains and rivers

The name on the county map is a small language lesson. “La Plata” is Spanish for “the silver.” The county was named for the La Plata Mountains, the range that rises west of Durango, and the La Plata River, which flows down out of them.

The same Spanish naming runs through the area’s waters. The county is laced with rivers that drain the San Juan high country, and several carry Spanish names: the Animas, the Florida, the La Plata, and the Los Pinos, also called the Pine. Reading the map, you are reading the languages of the people who have lived in and moved through this corner of Colorado.

Why it matters for a newcomer: place names here are not random. They are records. Knowing that the county is “the silver” connects the name on your address to the mountains above it, and to the mining era that fills so much of the region’s written history.

If you want to dig further, History Colorado is the state’s official historical agency, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System is the federal record of official place names, including the rivers named above.