Ecosystem services, the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, have been shown to have a positive relationship with biodiversity. The relationship of cultural ecosystem services (CES) with biodiversity is unclear because CES requires subjective evaluations that are difficult to quantify. Toponyms, the places name, reflect human assessment of the natural environment components, such as species composition, that may be reflexed in the place designation. Therefore, regions with greater biodiversity (e.g. species richness) might be expected to exhibit a greater proportion of toponyms related to biotic elements that places with lower biodiversity. We assessed this prediction using the meaning of 346 municipalities in Chile. Specifically, we analyzed the relationship between species richness and the proportion of toponyms that reference biotic elements at two spatial scales: coarse-grained (regions) and fine-grained (municipalities) scales. Toponyms were categorized according to language origin as being either native (non-Spanish, mainly from Mapuche and Quechua people) or non-native (Spanish). At the coarse-grained scale, we found a positive correlation between species richness and the proportion of toponyms associated with biotic elements (e.g. species names). This relation was maintained when only native language toponyms were considered. At the fine-grained scale, only toponyms with native origin showed a marginal relationship between species richness and the probability that toponyms carry a meaning related to biotic elements. We observed that biodiversity is reflected in the name of places, reinforcing the cultural importance of biodiversity, especially among native people. We propose that toponyms could be incorporated into models used to measure the relative importance of Cultural Ecosystem Services.