La Mancha, Tilting at Windmills and The Ruta de Don Quixote

“Don Quixote is the national glory of Spain.  No one who does not know that has the right to call himself a Spaniard.  There is a monument to him in Madrid…he was our first revolutionary.”, Gerald Brenan – South from Granada

According to the Spanish, that year (2009) Spain had had a longer and colder winter than usual, a fact that had been confirmed by the assessment of the man from the car hire firm and the weather over the previous two weeks had been changeable so it was with some nervousness that I opened the bedroom shutters to see what the day had in store.

I needn’t have worried because the sky was a perfect blue, the birds were singing a sweet tune and the honey coloured stone of the church opposite was radiating deliciously warm mellow tones into the courtyard below and from this elevated position in the town I could see that the blue extended seductively in all directions.  I instinctively knew that it was going to be a good day.

Breakfast in the hotel was simple but substantial and after substantial portions of  bread, ham and cheese we set off across the great plain of La Mancha in an easterly direction towards the city of Cuenca.

La Mancha is an arid but fertile elevated plateau of central Spain, the largest in the Iberian Peninsula, stretching almost two hundred kilometres between the Montes de Toledo and the western spurs of the Cerros de Cuenca.  On average it is six hundred metres above sea level and the climate is continental, but with extreme weather fluctuations.  This is one of the most sparsely populated areas of Spain and agriculture is the primary economic activity, principally wheat, barley, oats and vines, but it is severely restricted by the harsh environmental conditions that exist on account of its lack of rainfall, the exposure to wind and sun and by the almost complete absence of trees.    In fact years of neglect and lack of investment have created a serious land erosion problem on these dry plains.

I am making it sound dull and unappealing and I must correct that immediately because this was absolutely not the case.  Either side of the long straight road there were gently undulating fields with the most attractive colours that rolled rhythmically and desolately away in all directions.  Many of the fields were being prepared for this year’s crops and others were lying fallow and this produced a stunning vista of subtle hues and variations of tone; champagne and parchment, butter-milk cream, dusty olive, lavender grey, pheasant copper gold and russet copper red that were almost autumnal all lying crushed under the burden of a vivid blue spring sky.

One of the most interesting crops grown in La Mancha is the autumn crocus, the precious source of the world’s most expensive spice – Saffron, which is harvested from the dried stigma of the flower and is an essential ingredient of a Spanish paella and responsible for giving the dish its distinctive golden yellow appearance.  As this was March we obviously didn’t see any autumn crocus on this visit.

After a few kilometres there was a dusty track that left the road and led to the medieval castle of De Haro that was situated in a good position on the top of a hill and we drove to it but up close its condition was not what it seemed from a distance and it was not open to visitors so we retraced our steps and carried on.

Now we were on the ‘Ruta de Don Quixote’ which is the golden thread that binds the Castilian tourist industry together in a ribbon of castles and windmills stretching all the way from Cuenca to Toledo.

Don Quixote is a novel written by the seventeenth century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and is regarded as the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age.  It is the story of a man who believes that he is a knight, and recounts his adventures as he rights wrongs, mistakes peasants for princesses, and  “tilts at windmills,” mistakenly believing them to be evil giants.  As one of the earliest works of modern western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

In 2002 a panel of one hundred leading world authors declared Don Quixote to be the best work of fiction ever written, ahead even of works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  Cervantes has also been credited with shaping modern literary style, and Don Quixote has been acclaimed as “the first great novel of world literature”.  Since publication in 1605 it is reputed to be the most widely read and translated book on the planet after the Bible.

I tried to read it once but found it rather heavy going so gave up quite quickly but as we drove along I resolved to have another attempt upon returning home.

La Mancha, Don Quixote and Windmills

After a couple of hours we reluctantly left the attractive little town of Chinchón with its beautiful square basking languidly in the afternoon sun and after threading our way through the narrow streets twice, by some miraculous stroke of good fortune, found ourselves on the right road and heading south to the town of Belmonte in the province of Cuenca where we were due to stay for the next three nights.

After a short while the scenery began to change and it became much flatter but still with black olive trees and  gnarled vines twisting away like Chubby Checker and endless fields of pretty pastel colours and at some point we passed out of the region of Madrid and into Castilla-La Mancha and we were in the land of  Don Quixote and Sancho Panza but the first windmills that we saw soon after arriving were not the charming corn grinding mills of Cervantes  but modern wind turbines instead.

It was about a hundred kilometres to Belmonte, the road passed through several villages and it was busy, full of lorries and very slow.  The navigator fell asleep and I became frustrated by the lack of progress and when an opportunity presented itself left the regional road and joined the motorway instead.

This was much easier because for many Spaniards, driving on motorways is too expensive and the traffic density is gloriously low.  This is in contrast to the main trunk roads running parallel to the motorways, which are jammed by drivers who are reluctant, or simply cannot afford, to pay the high motorway tolls. Toll motorways in Spain are a luxury for the wealthy and the high charges discourage most Spaniards, particularly truckers, from using them and add to the irritating congestion on other roads.

Two junctions of the motorway cost €5.20 but it was worth every cent and we left it at Mota del Cuerva fifteen kilometres from Belmonte.  So far we had done ever so well but with the navigator still drowsy and a little disorientated this was where we managed to get confused and lost for the first time and had to double back and make several detours before emerging on the right side of the town next to a hill with a row of whitewashed Castilian windmills.

We stopped to see and take photographs and visited the little museum and admired the views over the flat, seemingly endless plains on either side of the elevated ridge above the town.

Leaving the windmills behind we drove to Belmonte and arrived at about six o’clock in a curiously quiet and deserted little town.  After a little bit of uncertainty we found the hotel Palacio Buenavista Hospedestra and checked in.

It was one of those ‘have I made the right choice’ moments that you can sometimes get on arrival but it turned out to be a delightful and ours was a big room with traditional furniture, a red tiled floor and a good view over the hotel garden and the church next door.  Very quickly the moment of doubt passed and I went out to find a shop for a bottle of screw top wine and some beer.

This took some finding but eventually I came across a mini-market tucked down a side street and the purchases were made.  It was a nice town and I have to say that I have a preference for hotels in smaller towns rather than staying in the big cities because on the whole they are friendlier and almost always cheaper!

Later we walked out to find somewhere to eat but this was a sleepy little place and there wasn’t a great deal to do so we found a local bar and went inside for a drink.  There were some local customers gathered around the bar and a family at an adjacent table.  There was a sign on the wall that said “No está permitido fumar” but it was next to a cigarette machine and the rule obviously didn’t apply here because the air was thick and grey with swirling acrid smoke.

Anti-smoking legislation became law in Spain on 1^st January 2006 but for small bars and restaurants the legislation offers the owner the choice of going smoke free or not but if it doesn’t it means that customers under eighteen years old are allowed in that bar.  This regulation was being flagrantly ignored as well.  Compared to other European countries, where smoking in the workplace is banned altogether, the Spanish legislation is weak and confusing and it is estimated that smoking continues in 90% of all small Spanish bars.

 It was a very traditional sort of place where the customers had that curious Spanish habit of throwing their litter on the floor just underneath the bar where there was a collection of papers, cigarette ends, sunflower seed shells and other miscellaneous waste that made the place seem most untidy.  Imagine doing that in the village pub in England and you’d get some disapproving looks and be asked to leave I’m sure!

They weren’t that used to foreign visitors either and the little girl with the family kept edging closer towards us driven on by curiosity but  always keeping a safe distance just in case we were visitors from another planet, and I suppose, to her, we might just as well have been.

With eating options in the town seriously limited (i.e. non-existent) we returned to the hotel and enjoyed a simple but enjoyable meal in the restaurant together with a bottle of local wine and then after an early start and a long day went back to the room and a good night’s sleep.

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Chinchón and a Grand Plaza Mayor

Spain is currently the world’s second largest tourist destination after France, with the population of forty-five million being swollen every year by as many as sixty million foreign visitors, most of whom make straight to the excellent but overcrowded beaches along the coasts.

But I am keeping away from the tourist hot spots and in the continuing search for real Spain have now visited Galicia and Cantabria in the north and old Moorish Andalusia in the south and this time, still staying well away from the crowds and the busy Costas had plans to visit inland Spain, to Castile and the provincial towns and cities around the capital of Madrid.

Already in the space of less than a year I had discovered that Spain is a country of immense diversity.  In respect of cultural development pre-revisionist historians traditionally identified two Spains, with the conventional view that the peninsula was an ideological battleground between the liberal heirs of the Enlightenment and the Republic and those who sought to preserve the Catholic ethos of traditional Spain and the Monarchy.  This was a battleground that reached its bitter climax in the civil war in the 1930s.

Geographically Spain is quite magnificent with green forests in the rainy north, mountains and vast plains in the central regions and arid deserts in the extreme south east.  With an area of just over three hundred thousand square miles Spain is the second largest country in Western Europe after France and with an average altitude of two thousand, one hundred and fifty feet it is the second highest country in Europe after Switzerland.

Spain is also a country of different people and the description ‘Spaniard’ is, it seems, just a rather convenient way of bundling them all together.  Richard Ford was an English traveller in Spain in the nineteenth century and in his ‘Handbook for Travellers in Spain’, published in 1845, was one of the first to identify that  ‘Spain is a bundle of local units tied together by a rope of sand’,  and Gerald Brenan in ‘The Spanish Labyrinth’ similarly observed ‘In what we may call its normal condition Spain is a collection of small, mutually hostile or indifferent republics held together in a loose federation’.

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It was an early morning Ryanair flight and in razor sharp clear skies the plane crossed the Atlantic Spanish coast somewhere close to the city of Santander and below us we recognised the two thousand five hundred metre high peaks of the Picos de Europa that we had visited last December, which were still snow capped and glistening brightly in the mid morning sun.

And then we crossed the massive northern mountainous regions of northern Spain.  It was brown and rocky with huge mysterious pine forests and blue shimmering lakes, long  roads negotiating the mountains and valleys and snaking between towns and villages and from above it was possible to begin to appreciate the immense size of the country.

Closer to Madrid the predominant browns gave way to vibrant greens and then into a mosaic of contrasting colours  as the aircraft made its final descent and landed at the airport.  It was rather disorganised but the customs were brilliant and the United Kingdom immigration control could learn a thing or two about getting passengers through an airport quickly from these guys.  Then collecting the car was gloriously simple as well and within forty minutes we were heading out of the city on the A3 motorway and on our way to the region of Castilla-La Mancha and our first destination, the town of Chinchón, about thirty miles south of Madrid.

Not far out of the city the scenery suddenly became more attractive with acres of olive trees and stumpy black vines slumbering in the fields each with the contorted face of a medieval gargoyle concealed within its gnarled and knotted trunk.  In the trees and on top of pylons there were stork nests and in the sky buzzards hung above us on the thermals looking for easy lunch in the fields below.

We arrived in Chinchón at about half past one and ignoring the edge of town tourist car parks steered the car towards the Plaza Mayor at the very centre of the town.  Parking has rarely been easier and there was a perfect spot right in the Plaza and I was sure there must surely be a catch.  There was a glorious blue sky and big sun and it was hot enough to change into summer holiday linens although this did take some of the locals by surprise as they were wrapped up in woollies and coats and still obviously uncertain about and distrustful of the early Spring weather.

It was a marvellous location with a big irregular shaped square that today was a car park but at other times is used for town festivals and the occasional bullfight; it is surrounded by houses of two and three floors with running balconies and shops, bars and restaurants on the ground floor.  We spent a few minutes soaking up the atmosphere and then we compared menu prices in the bars and selected the cheapest tables on the sunny side of the square and settled down for lunch where we enjoyed salad, calamari and tortilla and after a couple of glasses of Spanish beer set off to explore some of the tiny streets running off of the square.

We walked first through narrow streets of whitewashed houses to the top of the town and to a castle with excellent views over the houses and the surrounding villages and countryside but the castle was in a state of serious disrepair and closed to the public so we left and after calling in at the Parador hotel to see how wealthy people spend their holidays we walked to the other side of town and climbed again, this time to the church which had equally good views over the tiled roofs of the houses which in some way reminded me, in an ochre sort of way, of Tuscany.

El Cid, the Film, Fact and Fiction

In March 2009 I visited the town of Belmonte in Castilla-la Mancha and visited the castle were some of the scenes for the film El Cid were shot.  On the way back down after visiting the castle I crossed the exact spot where Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren filmed the closing scenes of El Cid.

El Cid is the national hero of Spain, rather like  Queen Elizabeth I or Winston Churchill in the United Kingdom or Abraham Lincoln in the USA.  He was a warrior, a nobleman, a knight, and a champion.  He became a legend within only a few years of his death and most Spaniards know about him because at school they read an epic poem called El Cantar de Mío Cid.  It is the first great poem in the Spanish language and was written about 1140, only fifty years or so after he died.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar known as El Cid Campeador, was a Castilian nobleman, a gifted military leader and a diplomat who fought for and then fell out with Alfonso VI, was exiled but later returned, and in the fight against the Moors conquered and governed the city of Valencia on the eastern Mediterranean coast.

It’s a good story but the film takes a few historical liberties so, in truth it is best not to rely upon it as a source document for serious study.

The film is a Hollywood historical epic starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren and tells the story of the heroic warrior as he sets about (seemingly single-handedly) recovering Spain from the Moors.  With its charismatic stars, a cast of thousands (wearing real armour and using real swords) and its grand themes of love, loyalty and justice, it perpetuates a glowing image of the greatest hero in Spanish history.

Cid is a towering and talismanic figure, the perfect chivalric knight, devoted to his wife and children, a magnificent warrior, unerringly true to his word and merciful to his opponents.  Most of all, he is sworn to the service of God and dedicated to saving Spain from the fearsome invaders from North Africa.

The reality of course is that this wasn’t a completely accurate portrayal of the great warrior and the life of  ‘El Cid’, from the Arabic sayyid, ‘lord’, differed from the film version in many crucial respects.

One aspect of the film that is somewhat confusing is the relationship between the Cid and some of the Spanish Muslims who he holds in high regard and treats with respect and here we begin with an aspect of the film, which is, broadly speaking, accurate.  The Cid’s generosity to some of his Muslim opponents and his alliances with local Muslims against other, more fundamentalist, Islamic armies are based on fact because El Cid was a mercenary who would, in fact, fight for either side if the money on offer was right.

Three centuries before El Cid lived, the Muslims of North Africa had conquered Iberia but slowly the Christians had regained control of the northern half of the peninsula and the two faiths established a practical live and let live arrangement.  Relations between the two faiths in Spain had yet to be sharpened by the inflammatory and inflexible rhetoric of crusade and jihad and furthermore, it was quite common for local groups of Christians and Muslims to make alliances to fight other Christians and Muslims.  But things were changing and El Cid lived just as the age when the Crusades was beginning and the Christians probably had their eye on the bits of the peninsula with the very best beaches.

El Cid lived at this time and the film shows him having Muslim allies, even though it carefully omits the numerous occasions when he acted for Muslim paymasters against Christians because he was, in short, a warrior for hire, a mercenary, who spent much of his career fighting for whoever paid him the most and the  film accurately pays tribute to his formidable military prowess for which others were prepared to pay.

His finest victory was the capture of Valencia in 1094, which is shown in the film on a grand Hollywood epic scale, complete with siege towers, cavalry charges, thousands of movie extras provided by General Franco and the full clash of medieval arms.

So there is at least some truth in the film and its plot, but it on the whole it is a highly romaticised version of the story.  The explanation for this lies in the identity of its historical consultant: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who was the foremost Spanish historian of his age and the author of the standard biography of the Cid, first published in 1929.

The portrait of the Cid Pidal promoted to the movie makers was flawed in two ways.  First, in the evidence he used because he gave substantial credibility to the ‘Poema de Mio Cid’, a work written at the height of the crusading age and, most crucially, fifty years after after the Cid’s death.  Then, his valiant deeds against Muslims made him a suitable exemplar to inspire a generation of holy warriors fighting the Crusades, and his life quickly moved into the realms of fantasy and legend.

The second reason for Pidal’s inaccurate characterisation of El Cid lies in the blurring between the historian’s version of medieval Iberia and many of his own perceptions about the Spain of his own lifetime. To him, the notion of a patriotic hero uniting his troubled country was highly attractive and one that fitted the nationalist mood of Spain in the 1930s.  Hence Heston’s El Cid repeatedly demands a victory ‘for Spain’, when in fact Spain as a national entity was of little relevance in the eleventh century and ‘for Castile’ would have been a much more likely rallying cry.

The end of the film is based entirely on legend.  Shortly before he died in 1099 he allegedly saw a vision of St. Peter, who told him that he should gain a victory over the Saracens after his death.  So he was clothed in a coat of mail and was mounted upon his favourite horse, Babieca,  fastened into the saddle and at midnight was borne out of the gate of Valencia accompanied by an army of a thousand knights.

They marched to where the Moorish king and his army was camped, and at daylight made a sudden attack. The Moors awoke and it seemed to them that there were as many as seventy thousand knights, all dressed in robes of pure white and at their head El Cid holding in his left hand a banner representing Reconquesta and in the other a fiercesome sword, La Tizona.

So afraid were the Moors that they fled to the sea, and twenty thousand of them are said to have drowned as they tried to reach their ships in panic.

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and his Horse, Babieca

El Cid and his Wife, Ximena

El Cid and his sword. La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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