Why Every Lamborghini Is Named After a Bull — and What Huracán and Urus Mean

In 1962 a tractor manufacturer from Emilia-Romagna drove to a ranch outside Seville to look at fighting bulls. He left with a badge, a naming convention, and sixty years of car names nobody outside Spain can pronounce.

Ferruccio Lamborghini visited the estate of Don Eduardo Miura, a renowned breeder of Spanish fighting bulls, and was impressed enough to adopt a raging bull as the emblem of the company he opened the following year. Almost every Lamborghini since has been named for a bull, a bull breed, a breeder, or a piece of the bullfight — and the handful of exceptions are the most interesting entries in the list.

This page is the whole list with the meanings attached, and then the six cars in our own garage in Los Angeles, so the names come with number plates rather than stock photographs. If you want the numbers that follow the names — LP 610-2, LP 640-4 — those decode differently and they have their own page.

The ranch outside Seville

Ferruccio Lamborghini made his money after the war rebuilding surplus military machinery into tractors, and then building his own. He founded Automobili Lamborghini on 7 May 1963 in Sant'Agata Bolognese. He was born on 28 April 1916, which makes him a Taurus, and he had a serious interest in bullfighting before he had a car company.

The Miura visit settled two things at once: the crest, which is a bull mid-charge, and the naming policy. It also produced the single most literal name in the catalogue — when Lamborghini built the mid-engined car that changed the industry in 1966, he named it after the breeder himself, and the fourth one built was shown to Don Eduardo at his ranch. Wikipedia's account of Lamborghini's vehicle nomenclature keeps the record of which name came from which animal, which matters because the factory's own pages disappear when a model does.

Every name, and what it means

Name	What it means
Miura	Not a bull but the breeder. Don Eduardo Miura, whose Seville ranch Ferruccio visited in 1962, and whose line of fighting bulls is the most feared in Spain.
Espada	Spanish for the sword, and by extension the man holding it. A four-seat V12 named after the instrument of the kill.
Islero	The Miura bull that killed the matador Manolete at Linares in 1947, the most famous death in twentieth-century bullfighting.
Jarama	A historic bullfighting region in Spain. Ferruccio worried it would be mistaken for the Jarama racing circuit, and he was right.
Urraco	A breed of fighting bull. The first attempt at a smaller, cheaper Lamborghini.
Countach	Not a bull at all. Contacc is a Piedmontese expletive, roughly an astonished "good grief", and the story is that Nuccio Bertone said it on first seeing the prototype.
Jalpa	Another bull breed, and the last small Lamborghini for twenty years.
Diablo	The Duke of Veragua's bull, famous for an epic fight against the matador El Chicorro in Madrid in 1869.
Murciélago	The bull whose life was spared by El Lagartijo in 1879 for the courage he showed in the ring. Also, separately, the Spanish for bat.
Gallardo	One of the five ancestral castes of the Spanish fighting bull. Not one animal but a bloodline.
Reventón	The bull that defeated the young Mexican torero Félix Guzmán in 1943.
Aventador	A fighting bull, and the V12 that followed the Murciélago.
Huracán	The Spanish word for hurricane, borrowed in turn from a Caribbean storm god, and the name of a bull known for its courage that fought in 1879.
Centenario	Not a bull. The hundredth anniversary of Ferruccio's birth in 1916.
Urus	Not a bull either, and older than all of them. See the section below.
Sián	Not a bull. Bolognese dialect for a flash of lightning, which is the factory's own accent rather than a Spanish word.
Revuelto	A fighting bull, and the V12 that followed the Aventador.
Temerario	A fighting bull. The word means reckless or daring, and it is what came after the Huracán.

Two patterns fall out of that list. The first is that the exceptions arrive in bursts — three of them in the twelve years after 1974, then none at all for thirty. The second is that the bull names get less specific as they go. The Islero and the Murciélago are individual animals with dates attached. The later names are, more loosely, fighting bulls. Sixty years of this will exhaust any register.

Urus is not a bull. It is an ox, and it is extinct

This is the entry people get wrong most often, and it is the one worth knowing.

The urus — more usually called the aurochs — is the wild ox from which every domestic cow on earth descends. It stood about six feet at the shoulder, ranged across Europe, Asia and North Africa, and the last known individual died in a Polish forest in 1627. The Latin word urus was used for the animal from the Gallic Wars onwards, which is to say Julius Caesar wrote about it. The Urus nameplate's derivation is exactly that: not a fighting bull in a ring but the ancestor of all of them.

Which is a better name for the car than the fighting-bull tradition would have produced. A Urus is not a supercar with a spoiler; it is the animal all the others came from, adapted to carry five people and their luggage. Whoever chose it was paying attention.

The ones that broke the rule

Every naming convention needs its exceptions and Lamborghini's are all defensible.

Two more sit outside the tradition without quite breaking it. The Centenario is an anniversary rather than an animal — Ferruccio was born in 1916 and the car arrived a hundred years later. And the Urus, which everyone assumes is a bull, is not one.

The six with names and number plates in Los Angeles

Two names out of eighteen, in six cars.

The Urus is the extinct wild ox and it is the five-seat super-SUV, in green, yellow and black. The Huracán is the 1879 bull and it is the two-seat V10, as a yellow coupé and two open cars. Everything else in the table above is somebody else's car or a museum piece, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

The two names that matter here have rates attached: what a Lamborghini actually costs in Los Angeles. If you have settled on the Huracán, the choice after that is the roof — coupé or Spider. If it is the Urus against the other super-SUVs, that is Urus vs Bentayga vs G 63. And the older argument, the one with Maranello in it, is Ferrari against Lamborghini.

Every Lamborghini in the fleet →