Don Quixote

The dusty plain of La Mancha, its inns and windmills, and the long road east that finally reaches Barcelona. Cervantes maps his knight onto real ground: the Campo de Montiel he sets out across, the windmills traditionally those of Campo de Criptana, El Toboso where Dulcinea is supposed to live, the Sierra Morena where he does penance, and the Barcelona beach where he is beaten. The places are real; the giants are windmills.

Don Quixote

The plain of Montiel

Part 1, ch. 2 · 6% through the novel

the renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting the lazy down, mounted his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to traverse the ancient and famous Campo de Montiel;' which in fact he was actually traversing.

On his first sally the old gentleman rides out across the real Campo de Montiel, narrating his own future glory as he goes. The chivalric romances have rewritten a bare Manchegan plain into the stage for a knight-errant, and the whole book proceeds from that one substitution.

explicit Cervantes names the Campo de Montiel by name, a real historic district in the south of Ciudad Real. It is a plain, not a point; the pin marks the town of Montiel that gives it its name.

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Don Quixote

The inn at Puerto Lapice

Part 1, ch. 2 · 6% through the novel

Writers there are who say the first adventure he met with was that of Puerto Lapice; others say it was that of the windmills; but what I have ascertained on this point, and what I have found written in the annals of La Mancha, is that he was on the road all day, and towards nightfall his hack and he found themselves dead tired and hungry, when, looking all around to see if he could discover any castle or shepherd's shanty where he might refresh himself and relieve his sore wants, he perceived not far out of his road an inn.

At the first inn he reaches, which he takes for a castle, the innkeeper humours him and dubs him a knight in a mock ceremony over a ledger of straw and barley. Cervantes names Puerto Lapice in the same breath, and the village has kept the association for four centuries.

inferred The knighting inn is unnamed, and Cervantes himself hedges: the narrator says some writers place the first adventure at Puerto Lapice and others at the windmills. Puerto Lapice, a real village on the old Andalusia road, has claimed the inn ever since and keeps a ventorro shown to visitors as Don Quixote's; the pin marks the village.

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