Where the Alvarado name comes from

Alvarado is a Spanish surname that grew out of the given name Álvaro. That given name reaches back further than Spanish, to Gothic.

The surname passed from Spanish into Tagalog and Cebuano, and in 2014 it ranked 444th among surnames in the Philippines, carried by 20,043 people. In the United States, the 2010 census counted 133,501 people named Alvarado, making it the 219th most common surname in the country. The name also went onto the map in California, where a former settlement in Alameda County, once the county seat and now part of Union City, was named after Juan Bautista Alvarado.