We were heading south towards La Mancha on the main road from Madrid when my
Sancho Panza threatened to turn stroppy. “Will there be anything to see,”
she asked suspiciously, “apart from windmills?”
“Don Quixote always found what he was looking for,” I replied, busying myself with a map of central Spain. “I expect we will, too.” By now, Rozinante – in the form of a rented Renault – was cruising through countryside that was becoming flatter and emptier with each passing mile. My companion, Nicky, who was doing the driving took her eyes rather dangerously off the road. “But what are we looking for?” she asked.
It was a good question. In our student days, Nicky and I had shared a rather dismal basement flat. Twenty-one years on, we occasionally share a bottle of wine. While doing so last autumn, Nicky suggested taking a short holiday in Spain. I prefer to travel alone but before I could say so tactfully, my eye fell on our bottle of cheap Spanish plonk: Denominación de la Mancha it said on the label. Don Quixote, famously, did not travel alone and I had visions of us scouring La Mancha on a horse and donkey, two middle-aged ladies in search of adventure. By the time the Denominación was empty, we had agreed to visit the land of Don Quixote – but with hire car, sans donkey. A hire car that Nicky would have to drive as I am terrified of motoring on "the wrong side" of the road.
Our first stop had already proved a little dispiriting. Alcalá de Henares is the small town north-east of Madrid that boasts the birthplace of Don Quixote’s creator, Miguel de Cervantes. Unfortunately, at the Casa Natal de Cervantes, we found a notice informing us that the place was closed for cleaning. Closer scrutiny of a guidebook revealed that the house is a 1950s reconstruction of the kind of dwelling Cervantes Senior might have owned. Several other locations in the town also claim to be the author’s birthplace.
Nearby, in the Plaza de Cervantes, we took consolation in a diminutive statue of the writer, with added black wrought-iron depictions of scenes from Don Quixote de la Mancha. These had been ingeniously and rather lewdly embellished with beer bottles and other such items by local students.
We agreed to head off farther south to continue our search and, more importantly for the moment, to find a much-needed coffee. Sancho Panza was not happy. No indeed. It had been a long diversion to Alcalá de Henares for not very much, she grumbled as the utterly uninteresting landscape of La Mancha stretched as far as the eye could see. Scrubby vine stumps – the remains of the year’s denominación - straggled across the low-lying fields, while large clouds of acrid smoke drifted aimlessly from countless smouldering fires. It looked like the aftermath of a battle, except that there were no bodies. Indeed, there were no landmarks and few buildings to break the monotony. No wonder Don Quixote left home in search of adventure. And here were we, almost four centuries on, combing the dullest terrain on Earth for no reason at all. I felt like laughing until I glanced at my companion. Don Quixote had beguiled Sancho Panza into accompanying him by promising him an island to rule. All my friend and erstwhile flatmate wanted was a cup of coffee.
It was then that we saw them. Far away on a hill ahead stood a line of whitewashed windmills perched like a row of freshly scrubbed giants, their great sails silhouetted dramatically against the bright blue sky. But we deferred the pleasure of a close encounter with the windmills at Consuegra until after lunch in nearby Puerto Lápice, one of the few places mentioned specifically in Cervantes’ novel.
Most small towns and villages in La Mancha claim a connection with the book and many have erected a statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to help substantiate their claims. Puerto Lápice, however, is indisputably named by Cervantes as the place where Don Quixote spent a night at an inn that he took to be a castle and, after an all-night vigil, persuaded the innkeeper to knight him. Naturally, all the local inns claim to be the location, and we enjoyed a good late lunch at the Venta del Quijote whose menu was authenticated by copious culinary quotations from the book. Unlike our hero, though, we paid our bill.
No visit to La Mancha is complete without paying homage to the village El Toboso, home to the lady in whose honour Don Quixote performed his many various and valiant deeds. The uncertainty in the book as to whether the knight ever met Dulcinea del Toboso – or whether, indeed, she even existed – does not perturb the villagers who have erected the obligatory wrought-iron statue and amassed a library containing 300 editions of the book in different languages. In Dulcinea’s “house”, we walked through several rooms containing an odd assortment of old furniture and kitchen utensils before it occurred to me that the lady no more existed than did Don Quixote – so whose house were we looking at? I sent Sancho Panza, who has more than a smattering of Spanish, to find out. Cervantes apparently knew the family who lived here, was the gist of it, so he obviously had this house in mind when he identified Don Quixote’s lady as coming from El Toboso. Ah, that explains everything...
We were late arriving at the nearby windmills of Campo de Criptana; the 10 that remain here are all that are left of 32 which were once La Mancha’s oldest surviving collection. One is used as a tourist office and another has been restored to full working order. The sun was rapidly disappearing over the distant horizon – there can be few more exhilarating sights than a line of ancient windmills on a hill top catching the last of the day’s rays.
The next morning, we visited the magnificent 15th-century castle of Belmonte. This is mentioned everywhere in connection with Don Quixote for no other reason than that its splendid presence high on a hill overlooking the plains is so much in keeping with the landscape of the book that, even if he did not mention it by name, Cervantes must surely have had it in mind. As we climbed its elaborately painted, dilapidated wooden stairway, and walked along corridors with crumbling gilded ceilings, we felt that any minute a knight might ride into the triangular courtyard outside and call up to the people hiding around us in the shadows.
Like our hero, we had set out across the plains of La Mancha determined to find what we were looking for – that we hadn’t really found it, and now did not expect to find anything did not particularly matter.