Where the Pena name comes from

In Portuguese, Pena is a place name marking the presence of a crag, and it goes back to the Vulgar Latin penna. The same Latin root also gave Portuguese the form Penha, so the two spellings are doublets of one word. As a place name, Pena marks a neighbourhood and former civil parish of Lisbon, and another of Vila Real.

Pena also reached English as a borrowing of the Spanish surname Peña, which remains its alternative spelling. An accented spelling, Péna, is carried as a surname too. Finland has an unrelated Pena, a short form of the male given name Pentti.