Wined, dined and rested.

This post may seem a little arcane to anyone who hasn’t studied Golden Age Spanish literature, or read the adventures of don Quijote, so if you find that to be so I apologise.

But surely everyone feels a little flutter of excitement when they visit a place made famous in a book, don’t they? There are, by all accounts, many people who visit a certain chapel in Scotland made famous by Dan Brown in his story about the Holy Grail – slightly off topic, I suppose, but thinking of that book always makes me giggle. Early on we are introduced to a brilliant scientist, finest in her area of science, who is surprised to find that her mobile phone has no signal 16 floors underground. Not surprisingly, on the other hand, we have also learned by that point that she is lithe as a young gazelle, eyes like pools of molten Baileys, mane of hair as splendid as spun sugar etc etc.

Anyway, I read don Quijote many years ago, with some trepidation initially. But I rapidly found that this novel, published first in 1605, was completely hilarious and had me laughing out loud time after time. Shakespeare was still writing at that time and frankly I find his work a lot harder to understand than Cervantes’ Spanish.

Even if you haven’t read about the adventures of this poor, deluded book-lover, I’m sure that most people must have heard of his most famous misadventure, the one with the windmills when he charges at them on his poor old nag, Rocinante, believing the windmills to be giants that he as a knight errant is bound to challenge.

Well, having stayed at Belmonte, which is nearby, we made a slight detour and visited the VERY WINDMILLS that don Quijote attacked… yes, I do know that he is a literary figure and as such not real, but it is supposed that ‘his’ windmills were the ones at Campo de Criptana. Or something like them. Who cares, I was just ridiculously excited to see these 10 windmills and wander round them as they sit on a hill above the town giving off a slightly superior air – “yes I suppose there is some kind of settlement down below, but WE are here, and WE are famous because WE feature in a work that some call Europe’s first modern* novel” .

* There were novels in ancient Greece and a few in Rome, but “don Quijote” is agreed by most to be the first to emerge after the fall of those great civilisations.

In fact, all of these windmills have names and some of them have been turned into mini museums – although, rather oddly, none of them seem to be don Quijote-themed – but we didn’t have time to stop and look.

And I didn’t mind, because in my head as I wandered in a sort of trance from one to the other with a stupid grin on my face I could see the “knight errant” followed by his hapless squire, Sancho Panza on his donkey, turning time and time again to charge the turning blades. I was happy, and my travelling companions were kind enough to put up with this rather odd detour.