Spain

The 1918 pandemic is named for the only country reporting it honestly.

Wartime censorship suppressed reporting elsewhere, while neutral Spain covered the outbreak freely. The name records press freedom, not origin.

Medieval French daydreamers put their imaginary castles in Moorish Spain.

English took the image from the Old French chateaux en Espagne, which appears in the Roman de la Rose and reached English readers through Chaucer. The usual explanation is that a knight could hold no land in Muslim-ruled Spain, making a castle there pure fantasy; that reading is a later reconstruction rather than a medieval gloss.

Not a fly, not especially Spanish, and far more dangerous than romantic.

The emerald green beetle lives across southern and central Europe, and its irritant cantharidin was gathered wherever it swarmed rather than in Spain alone. It works by inflaming the urinary tract, and the dose that excites sits uncomfortably close to the dose that kills.

Spanish jasmine is from South Asia; Spain was only the middleman.

The plant reached Mediterranean gardens from South Asia and Arabia, and Spanish and later French growers supplied the perfume trade, which is how the name attached itself. It also sells as royal jasmine and Catalonian jasmine, labels that likewise point at the trade rather than the origin.