How Did Malaga, Washington Get Its Name?

Malaga, Washington is situated near the banks of the Columbia River in Southern Chelan County.

The small town is home to roughly 2,500 residents and is about 6.5 miles southeast of Wenatchee.

The town was known throughout the North Central Washington area for many years as the closest populated place to the Alcoa aluminum manufacturing plant, which operated from 1952 to 2016, when it was mothballed by the Tennessee-based company.

Even the name of the primary paved road that leads to the community still bears the namesake of the plant – the Malaga-Alcoa Highway.

Get our free mobile app

Although Alcoa hasn't operated the plant for nearly a decade now, the town continues to grow, since the Wenatchee area has become a mecca for Washington's Westside residents who are looking to retire in a favorable place away from the high-cost, hustle-and-bustle of the big city.

The town is also undergoing quite a boom these days, with the coming addition of a Microsoft data center and possibly, the world's first nuclear fusion power plant too.

Despite its forward charge into the realm of industrial metallurgy for over six decades, as well as its future surge into silicon-coded networking and atomic energy, the town of Malaga – like most places in North Central Washington, has humble beginnings.

The community was home to a variety of planters and farmers in its early days back in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, and one pioneering farmer and irrigation promoter who called the area home actually named the town after what he was planning to grow there – grapes!

Well, actually Malaga grapes, to be more precise.

The viticulturist chose this variety of grape for his vineyards due to the area's similarities with the region of Spain that bear their namesake...and wouldn't you know it, the name stuck and has been used by locals to refer to the town ever since.

The name Malaga also took on its own set of Central Washington phonetics as well, and is a common proper noun of mispronunciation by non-locals.

Whereas, the Spanish Malaga – which is a veritable modern metropolis of nearly 600,000 residents, is pronounced 'muh-LOG-uh', Washington's iteration of the same moniker for its own town with about 97% fewer people is said “MAL-uh-guh” instead.

There are also towns named Malaga in five other states (California, Kentucky, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Ohio) and eight other countries (Australia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sudan).

Of course, one of the biggest ironies of Malaga's namesake is that North Central Washington didn't gain any acclaim as a wine-producing region until the turn of the 21^st Century, but that didn't sour the town's own historical grapes any at all.

The town was officially founded in 1903 and remains unincorporated to this day, although it has its own zip code of 98828.

Malaga sits at 682 feet above sea level and its global coordinates are 47°22′20″N 120°12′04″W .