Don Quixote: La Mancha's Windmills to Barcelona

Every route into Don Quixote starts in a village the narrator refuses to name: "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember." He refuses again in the last chapter, so that every town of La Mancha can claim the book. In 2004 a team at Complutense University argued for this village, and it now calls itself "El lugar de la Mancha". It is the capital of Campo de Montiel, the plain Don Quixote crosses on his very first sortie.

Location precision: Cervantes names no village; the pin marks Villanueva de los Infantes, the reading argued by a 2004 Complutense study.

Don Quixote's first sortie ends at an inn he reaches at nightfall, and the innkeeper settles the question of chapels: "the whole point of being dubbed a knight lay in the accolade and in the slap on the shoulder." Reading from his account book as if repeating a devout prayer, he strikes the newcomer on the neck, and at dawn the new knight rides out so happy he can hardly contain himself. The inn is never named. The narrator says some writers put his first adventure at Puerto Lápice, and the fight with the Biscayan is set near the same village.

Location precision: The inn is unnamed; the pin marks Puerto Lápice, the village the narrator names as one candidate for the first adventure.

Then the most famous scene of all: "At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on that plain." Don Quixote takes them for giants; Sancho says they are windmills. He charges the first, drives his lance into the sail, and the wind shivers the lance to pieces and sends horse and rider rolling over the plain. Campo de Criptana says its mills are the ones he fought in chapter VIII. The town keeps ten of them, and three date from the sixteenth century: Burleta, Infanto and Sardinero.

Location precision: No windmill is named in the novel; the pin marks Campo de Criptana, whose ridge is the best-known candidate.

Visitor guidance: The mills stand on the famous ridge above the town.

They ride into El Toboso at midnight, and the first building Don Quixote takes for a palace is the parish church: "It's the church we have lit upon, Sancho." Sancho is no help: his only account of Dulcinea is a girl sifting wheat, with the dust so thick it hid her face. El Toboso is Dulcinea's home town, and the house of Ana Martínez Zarco, the woman Cervantes made his Dulcinea from, stood on a site in the town; it was rebuilt in the 1960s. Since the 1970s the house fronts have carried phrases lifted straight out of the novel.

Location precision: The novel names the town and its church but no street; the pin marks the town centre.

Visitor guidance: The phrases quoted from the novel are fixed to the house fronts along the streets.

Before anything else on this stretch of road Don Quixote says he means to enter the cave of Montesinos, of which marvels are reported all over the country. He goes down, sleeps an hour, and wakes three days older in his own reckoning, having met Montesinos and heard the lament of Guadiana and the daughters of Ruidera: "O tearful Guadiana, and ye O hapless daughters of Ruidera." It is a natural cave near Ossa de Montiel, in Albacete, and a listed historic site.

Location precision: The novel says only "the cave of Montesinos"; the pin marks the cave above Ossa de Montiel.

Visitor guidance: Inside the Lagunas de Ruidera park above Ossa de Montiel; the cave is a listed historic site.

Ruidera is in the plan: on the way to the cave Don Quixote says he will also track down "the origin and true source of the seven lakes commonly called the lakes of Ruidera", and the guide promises to show him both. Much later, in Barcelona, Sancho measures the Barcelona sea against the lagoons he remembers from La Mancha. Don Quixote says seven; the park is a chain of sixteen lagoons along the old Guadiana, shared by five municipalities, and the cave of Montesinos lies within it.

Location precision: The novel speaks of the lakes as a whole; the pin marks the chain of lagoons in the Lagunas de Ruidera park.

Visitor guidance: The sixteen lagoons are strung along one valley road through the park.

Roque Guinart's plan is to leave Don Quixote in full armour on Rocinante in the middle of the city's strand on Saint John's Day; they reach it on Saint John's Eve, at night. Later, on board the galleys, the crews salute him with "Hu, hu, hu" three times and pass Sancho hand to hand from bench to bench; Sancho cannot make out how the ships have so many feet. Then the Knight of the White Moon, who turns out to be the bachelor Samson Carrasco from Don Quixote's own village, unhorses him. Tradition says Cervantes himself lodged on today's Passeig de Colom.

Location precision: The novel says only "the strand of the city"; the pin marks the Passeig de Colón seafront, where the house called Casa Cervantes stands.

Visitor guidance: The Passeig de Colón seafront walk is public; the house called Casa Cervantes stands on it.