Tilting at Windmills with Julià Travels

This is the third, and last, post on my Don Quijote Experience with Julià Travels. The first two can be found below:

Wining and Dining in La Mancha
Belmonte Castle

Sadly, I have to admit - my knowledge of Don Quixote comes not through through Cervantes, but from general cultural osmosis and Broadway's Man of La Mancha. I found myself humming the tune ‘The Impossible Dream’ a lot in 2018. In February, I was told that my position at work was being cut, meaning the best two years of my adult life (something I fully realized at the time and was thankful for each day) were over. The impossible dream of job stability... it’s exhausting. Ugh.

Anyway, back to La Mancha. While La Mancha, from Arabic, means the dry place or wilderness, in Spanish it translates directly to 'the spot'. Scholars believe Cervantes chose La Mancha as the setting for his novel because of the name - suggesting a blot on the honor of his titular "knight" - but also because it was the most boring, prosaic, unromantic place in the whole of Spain. And in doing so, perhaps inadvertently made La Mancha a byword for whimsy, impossible dreams, and general quixotic-ness.

Don Quixote is important in so many different ways - it's one of the earliest Western novels, it helped develop the Spanish language and gave loanwords to many others, it remains on lists of the world's best literature five centuries after its first publication. Throughout history, Cervantes' story has been interpreted many different ways, from the author laughing at his main character to holding him up as a tragic symbol of lost days.

While Paco, our guide, had been filling us in on bits of history and literary trivia as we traveled through La Mancha, we headed for our first Don Quixote-specific site following lunch - the windmills at Mota del Cuervo.

There are three sites in La Mancha with a field of windmills - one at Mota del Cuervo, one at Campo de Criptana, and one at Consuegra. The ones at Campo de Criptana sit on a hill above a white-washed village, while the ones at Consuegra sit along a winding road with an amazing castle view. From what I could see on Google Images, the Mota del Cuervo windmills seemed to sit next to a parking lot. I wasn't expecting much, but I ended up happily surprised. A) According to Paco, the Consuegra windmills were damaged this winter anyway and B) I didn’t have to worry – between the flowers and blue skies, the Mota del Cuervo windmills were very picturesque.

Mota del Cuervo has seven windmills in total, and each one is named - El Zurdo (the original, which served as the model for restoring the others), El Piqueras, El Cervantes, El Goethe, El Franz Grillparcer, El Irak, and El Gigante. The latter serves as the tourist office and is still an operating mill. On Saturdays they grind grain into flour, but you can tour inside and see the equipment most days of the week. While the Spanish-speaking portion of our tour group went up, I wandered around taking lots of photos. When it came time for the English group, there were just three of us - practically a private tour!

The windmills were new tech in Cervantes’ time, meaning that Don Quixote had every reason to be confused when he ran across them. As far as literary allusions go, they could also be seen as symbols of the church, as the shape of their blades echoes the shape of the cross. The actual roof of the windmill moves so it can catch the wind, which I somehow didn’t realize before now. (Horses or donkeys pull the structure around using the long wooden pole.) Inside El Gigante, we also saw a replica of Don Quixote's metal hat – and were given a demonstration of its actual purpose, as a bowl for a dentist or barber to tuck under a customer's chin, or a doctor to use for bloodletting.

Our last two stops were in the village of Toboso, where Dulcinea, the object of Don Quixote's affections, lived. We watched a short film about Don Quixote at the Museo Cervantino and saw loads of copies of the novel signed by different historic personages (Mandela, Mussolini, Hitler). Then we visited the Museo-Casa de Dulcinea del Toboso, a recreation of the character's house. It was neat and the tiny town looked as if it would be fun to explore, but by this point, we were all tired and hot and just kind of breezed through on the way back to the bus.

 

We went back to Madrid by a different route, passing Toledo – the scenery wasn't as pretty, but was hilly and different. We were dropped off at Plaza de España, which has a large monument to Cervantes' immortal creation. It was a nice way to wrap up a very fun, full day of sightseeing. As I mentioned in the first post, I thought this was a well-planned tour, and our guide, Paco, made it even better!