, officially, is a city in the province of Castelló, in the Valencian Community, Spain.The city is located at 42 m above sea level, 7 km to the south of the province's capital (Castelló de la Plana), which it is separate from by the Mijares (or Millars) River. it has 51,367 inhabitants (2010 data), most of them living in the urban area that covers about 10.72% of its comarca's 55.4 km2 surface. Ranked by population, it is the second-largest city in the province (after the capital), and fifteenth in the Valencian Community.The city was founded with royal status by King James I of Aragon in 1274 during his campaign to regain Muslim territory in present-day Valencia during the Reconquista. It later became an agricultural centre for orange cultivation, and more recently a centre for the ceramics industry.NameBoth the Castilian Spanish Villarreal and Valencian Catalan Vila-real are cognates meaning 'Royal Village', due to the city's foundation by King James I of Aragon. Throughout the Middle Ages, as were most European settlements, it was known by its Latinised name Villae Regalis. A 1592 tapestry of the Valencian Parliament shows the city's representative with the old Valencian name Vilareal. It was in the late 18th century, as Spain became more centralised, that the Castilian name took over. The city was renamed in 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, as Villarreal de los Infantes (Royal Town of the Infantes), to avoid confusion with other Spanish localities with the same name. It is sometimes still referred to under this extended version.