In search of Don Quixote

In search of Don Quixote

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I confess: I have not read "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha," the literary masterpiece by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

It was number one on the list of my high-school mandatory books but that year I left for the United States. While my friends read about the adventures of the "Knight of the Sad Countenance," I struggled through the epic poem Beowulf.

. El Toboso, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Consuegra, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

Cervantes did not give away the name of the birthplace of Don Quixote, a middle-aged gentleman who becomes obsessed with chivalrous ideals and takes up his lance and sword to venture along Spain's roads to perform heroic deeds in the name of his beloved Dulcinea.

But many identify Argamasilla de Alba, a weather-beaten village of almost 7,000 people, as his hometown.

. Puerto Lapice, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

This year marks 400 years since the death of Cervantes, a perfect excuse for a road trip in the footsteps of Don Quixote and his loyal squire Sancho Panza across the high plains of today's La Mancha, the arid region south of Madrid.

. Alcazar De San Juan, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Alcazar De San Juan, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

Unlike Don Quixote, who left home at dawn on a hot July day, I leave Madrid in the midst of a storm. The forecast says it will rain all day everywhere in Spain. Not the beginning I imagined. My idea is to capture the mood and energy of the region that he had described in so much detail. So in true Quixote spirit I think of the weather as an opportunity. The rain will force me to picture things in a different light, literally and metaphorically.

. Argamasilla De Alba, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Dosbarrios, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

"The two most international things about La Mancha are Don Quijote and our cheese," Angel Gutierrez Carrasco, a 55-year-old shepherd, says while tending his flock by the Penarroya dam, near the quiet town of Argamasilla de Alba. Carrasco has not read Cervantes but he is well aware of the episode when Don Quixote charges at two herds of sheep after taking them for armies.

Every year he lends animals to a theatre group to reenact parts of the novel on the streets of Argamasilla.

. Argamasilla De Alba, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

Cervantes didn’t give away the name of Don Quixote’s birthplace, but some people identify it as Argamasilla. Other locations in La Mancha fight for that distinction, but Argamasilla showcases a rebuilt house with a cave underneath where, according to local legend, Cervantes was imprisoned.

In the prologue to "El Quijote," Cervantes wrote that his work had been "engendered in a jail". These days visitors can see the Cave of Medrano and imagine that Cervantes wrote part of his masterpiece there.

. El Toboso, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Alcazar De San Juan, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

Benjamin Montesinos, 92, is adamant about where Cervantes himself was born. "In Alcazar de San Juan, no matter what people from Alcala de Henares say," Montesinos says, in open disagreement with scholars who widely accept that Cervantes was a native of the latter, east of Madrid.

Montesinos is the only person I met during my five days in la Mancha who had read "El Quijote" from beginning to end.

"It is out of this orbit," he says. His astronomer son is partly responsible for getting a star named after Cervantes and four planets in its orbit named after Don Quixote, his beautiful lady Dulcinea, his squire Sancho and his horse Rocinante.

. El Toboso, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Consuegra, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

Cervantes and Don Quixote have finally gone cosmic.

The clouds obscure any sign of stars when I meet Italian travellers Irene Decarli, 57, and Enrico Kaswalder, 60, sharing dinner inside their camper by the bleached-white windmills of Consuegra. We strike up a conversation in English as I mistake them for northern Europeans, but as soon as they correct me, we go on to talk about La Mancha and Don Quixote in our mother tongues.

I ask them the reason behind Don Quixote's universal appeal and after some mimicking I make out that people relate to him because he is a free spirit. "Like you?" I ask them. Irene smiles and nods in agreement.

. El Toboso, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. El Toboso, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

Left: Sister Isabel poses with a box of sweets "Caprichos de Dulcinea" (Dulcinea cravings) made at her convent.
Right: A man walks past a statue of Dulcinea.

I search for Don Quixote's great love Dulcinea in the village of El Toboso, where she is supposed to have lived, but to no avail. There is only one woman named after the Princess of La Mancha there, but she now works in London and is tired of journalists misquoting her.

However, Sister Isabel, 39, a cloistered nun of the Order of Saint Clare, makes sweets named after Dulcinea and invites me to her convent's bakery.

She and other nuns have been making the best-selling "Caprichos de Dulcinea" (Dulcinea's cravings) since 2005, the fourth centenary of the publication of the first part of "El Quijote".

. Ossa De Montiel, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Campo De Criptana, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera

As I drive towards the town of Ossa de Montiel on my last day in La Mancha I take stock of all the interesting people and places I've come across.

Nothing can prepare me for what I find inside the Cave of Montesinos, by the sapphire blue lagoons of Ruidera. While descending into the cave where some claim Don Quixote fell asleep to have the most fantastic of dreams, my guide, Liberto Chilleron, signals with his flashlight to what looks like powder on the ground. I take it for bat droppings.

To my surprise, the grey dust lit in the cave’s darkness are the ashes of "Bob, el Quijote Ingles."

Bob, Chilleron tells me, was an Englishman who came to live in Ossa de Montiel out of love for his Spanish wife. He started impersonating Don Quixote outside the cave and along the lagoons, and gathered a following of locals and tourists. Alas, he died in a car accident in January and his family decided to scatter his ashes in the places he was so passionate about.

After five days of seeking out Don Quixote in every corner of La Mancha, I find him in a bat cave - and he turns out to be English. Truth, stranger than fiction.

. Puerto Lapice, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera
. Alcazar De San Juan, SPAIN. Reuters/Susana Vera