Tropical City Name Generator

Real tropical cities are named in a few recognizable ways, and convincing invented ones borrow the same habits. Across Latin America and the Philippines, Spanish colonial ports combine a saint or a virtue with a coastal feature: Puerto, Bahía, Punta, Cayo, Isla, Playa or Costa, as in Puerto Solano or San Mateo del Mar. Brazilian and Lusophone coasts do the same with Porto, Praia, Ilha, Baía and Vila, often mixed with Tupi words like Itacoatiá or Ubatumirim. French islands give you Port-, Anse-, Pointe-, Morne- and Baie- compounds, and the English-speaking Caribbean names towns after whatever was grown or shipped there: Sugar Bay, Cane Harbour, Tamarind Town.

Further west and east the sound changes completely. Polynesian and Hawaiian settlements are built from a short stock of open syllables (Kahaloa, Mahina Bay, Vaitahi), Malay and Indonesian towns use Kota, Teluk, Tanjung, Pantai and Pulau, Thai beach towns use Hat, Ao, Ko and Laem, and the Swahili coast gives you Bandari, Pwani and Kisiwa. A fantasy setting can ignore all of this and simply sound warm: Solmara, Coralhaven, Lagoonmere.

Pick one naming tradition per region of your map and stick to it. A coast with Puerto Esmeralda next to Port-Hibiscus next to Kota Laut reads as a random list; a coast with five Spanish-built ports and one old Polynesian village reads like history.