It is getting harder to share a name with anyone else

The simplest reason is that there are more different names. When participants are spread across more options, it is less likely that any of them will coincide, and that happens even when the lists are the same size.

Another reason lies at the top of the list. The most common name in each edition now covers a smaller share of the participants than at the start of our data, and the same is true of the group of names that leads the list. Being the most popular name still exists, but it no longer means the same: there are fewer children behind each name.

Besides, the classics are losing weight and nobody quite takes their place. Some of the most common names of the past are much less frequent today, and the ones on the rise do not gather as many children as the older ones did.

And new names arrive every year. A growing share of the participants has a name that was not on the lists before, and each new name takes a share of the children the others used to have.

All of this coexists with a very stable top. A few names stay up there edition after edition, and the change is not a revolution but a slow, steady movement. That is why it is hard to notice from year to year, and why it shows clearly when compared over time.

The data we used

Here we use the lists of 16 editions, from 2008 to 2026; there is no data for 2009, 2010 or 2021. In total there are 71,418 entries with an identified name. For each participant we count only the first name: Jon Ander counts as Jon.

Two important caveats. We count entries, not people: a child who marches for several years appears in every edition, and in the latest editions around half of the list was already on the previous one. Also, each list is a snapshot of children of different ages, so comparing editions shows how that snapshot changes, not how a particular generation does.

The 2012 and 2022 lists include around 25 schools, compared with 40 or more in the others. We use them in the overall counts, but they do not appear in the evolution charts because they are not comparable with the rest. 2009, 2010 and 2021, for which there is no data, do not appear either.

Sharing a name is less and less likely

A simple way to measure how often names repeat is to pick two participants at random from the same edition and ask whether they share a name.

Put another way, sharing a name with another participant is now 38% less likely than in 2008. What follows explains why.

There are more names to spread across

It might be enough to count different names: there were 622 in 2008 and 1,026 in 2026. But that comparison is unfair. In 2026 there were more participants (5,280 compared with 4,019), and the more participants there are, the more different names appear even if tastes do not change.

To compare them on equal terms we ran a draw. From each edition we picked 2,761 participants at random, the size of the smallest list; we repeated the draw 30 times and kept the average. By that yardstick, about 517 different names appear in 2008 and about 714 in 2026: 197 more, a 38% increase.

The result does not depend on how we measure. If we look only at the 35 schools present in all 12 complete editions, the increase holds: between 2023 and 2026, with almost the same number of participants (from 4,213 to 4,236 each year), the number of different names goes from 843 to 957.

In other words: there are more names to spread across, and that variety is not down to the size of the lists.

The most popular names weigh less

The first thing that changes is the top. The ten most common names of 2008 accounted for 20.9% of the participants; in 2026, 14.5%. Behind each popular name there are fewer children.

The classics are losing weight

The twenty most common names of 2008 (among them Ane, Jon, Iñigo, Leire, María, Ander, Mikel and Asier) accounted for 34.1% of the participants. In 2026, those same twenty names account for 15.1%.

The twenty favourites of 2026 (Nora, Ane, Jon, Sara, Maddi, Telmo, June…) add up to 24.6%: less than the 2008 ones did.

The individual cases show it. María went from 85 participants in 2008 (rank 5) to 26 in 2026 (rank 50). Leire, from 89 to 37. Iñaki, from 30 to 3. And at the same time others are rising: Martina and Laia now outnumber all of them.

The classics lose children as other names gain, but none of the rising ones gathers what the classics once did. That is why the split is increasingly wide.

More new names arrive every year

Some names hardly appeared a decade ago. In 2013 there was 1 participant called Martina; in 2026, 62. Luka went from 1 to 38, Laia from 2 to 45 and Noa from 4 to 53. Leo was not among the 2013 participants; in 2026 there are 28.

The renewal is visible across the whole list. Of the 5,280 participants in 2026, 536 have a name that does not appear in any of the editions from 2008 to 2016: one in ten. In 2017, the figure was 3.2%.

Each new name that enters the lists takes a share of the children the others used to have. So even if the top barely moves, each name ends up with fewer participants.

The shared stock is narrowing

Of all the names that have appeared on the lists, 189 have been present in all 16 editions: they are the familiar names, the Tamborrada’s common stock. Together they account for 73.8% of all entries. But every year they cover fewer participants: from 77.5% in 2008 to 63.9% in 2026.

At the other extreme, 968 names, more than a third (35%) of all the different names, have appeared in only one edition.

The common stock is still the majority, but it covers fewer and fewer children: more and more of them have uncommon names.

The top changes slowly

Amid so much change, some names have never left the top. Ane and Jon have been among the five most common in all 16 editions. Ander has been in the top ten in 15 of them.

That stability explains why the top changes slowly: from one edition to the next, between 7 and 9 of the ten most common names stay in the top 10.

Nora: the changeover at the top

Nora is the best example of that changeover. In 2008, of the 4,019 participants with an identified name, only 14 were called Nora: it ranked number 70 on the list. In 2026 it is the most common name: 110 out of 5,280.

Its rise is real, but it comes with nuances. It ranked number 15 in 2013, number 4 in 2016 and number 2 in 2020. It also topped the 2022 list, but that edition is incomplete and we do not take it as evidence.

In the complete editions, Nora was second in 2020, 2023 and 2024, always behind Ane, and first only in 2025 and 2026: by 8 participants in 2025 (101 against 93) and by 11 in 2026 (110 against 99). Since 2020 its weight has barely moved: it sits between 1.9% and 2.1% of the participants. Nora is no longer growing; it has levelled off at the top.

Who leads changes, but not how much the leader weighs: whoever tops the list today covers a smaller share of the participants than whoever topped it before.

What the data say and what they do not

These data allow us to say that, between 2008 and 2026, the participants’ first names are more varied: at equal size, each edition brings together more different names, and the most common ones weigh less.

They do not tell us why. The lists include neither age nor year of birth, so we cannot talk about generations or attribute the changes to any cause. Nor do they distinguish variants of the same name (Xabier and Javier, Iñaki and Ignacio or Ane and Ana count as different names), and the 2008 and 2011 editions may be somewhat incomplete.

Choosing among many

What the Children’s Tamborrada lists show is not the disappearance of the traditional names, but a different distribution. Ane and Jon are still among the five most common, and from one edition to the next almost the whole top 10 stays. But around them more and more names appear, and the most popular ones account for a smaller part of each edition.

That is the underlying explanation: more names, tops that weigh less, classics that fade and newcomers that keep arriving. Each of those pieces, however small, takes away some of the chance of finding another child with your name.