Today was our Cervantes day. Cervantes is the author of Don Quixote and this region is the setting for the book. It is one of the great books of the world and both Ton and I love the story of the slightly delusional knight on an adventure thru the countryside of La Mancha.

We started the day at Campo Criptano which is a pretty hilltop town famous for its windmills. As Don Quioxte is a work of fiction many towns are able to claim that they are the inspiration for a scene in the book. Windmills like those found in Campo Criptano are common in the area but since we visited here first we are giving them credit. In the book Don Quixote identifies the windmills as giants that must be slain to protect the locals. He engages one of the windmills in a joust which he rather spectacularly loses.


We walked thru the town down to the square. La Mancha is a much less developed and peopled area of Spain. The towns tend to be small and sleepy. The roads are quiet and easy to drive on. We are enjoying driving thru the fields looking at the different crops. Right now it looks like they are bringing in the wheat crop, as well as garlic. We passed a couple of fields where the garlic is being picked and enjoyed the strong odor in the air as we went by.

The next stop on the drive was Puerto Lapice. In the book Don Quixote misidentifies a humble country inn as a great castle and asks the inn keeper to knight him so he can go about his quest to help the people of La Mancha. At the inn he also meets his lady Dulcinea who is a common women, but he sees as a women of beauty and virtue. Puerto Lapice claims that their inn is the inspiration for the inn in Don Quixote and since they are conveniently located on a freeway exit, it has driven a lot of tourist traffic for the town. The town itself is unimpressive, and for some reason mostly closed on Thursday.

Our last stop for the day was Almargo which does not make any claims to be the site of an event in Don Quixote. It does have a very nice and unusual town square, and in the 1500’s was one of the richest cities in Spain. We had a beer and a plate of ham for lunch in a bar on the square; remember Spanish lunches are from 1 to 3pm, we were closer to 3pm, before heading off to our campground for the night. When we checked into the campground the owner told me the restaurant would open for dinner at 8:30 pm, the Spanish have a really different concept of meal hours than we do.

After our ridiculously early dinner by Spanish standards at 6:45 we went for a nice evening stroll thru the vineyards and wheat fields around the campground. It was a nice day to end our day in La Mancha.
