In the footsteps of Don Quixote: Campo de Criptana

Someone once said, who knows if under the influence of that wine that makes good Latin, as François Rabelais said through the mouth of his character, Gargantúa, that Don Quixote was the second Bible in Spain and in my opinion, he was not wrong.

From this point of view and metaphorically speaking, despite respecting the distances, it could be said that walking the roads of La Mancha, following or trying to follow the footsteps of our most universal knight, means embarking, also, on a mystical and so rich in nuances, mysteries and wonders, like those others that marked the adventure of the Jewish people in the Exodus.

Because who knows if any of those legendary twelve tribes of Israel ended up in these infinite plains, in which Jews, Muslims and Christians developed for centuries and references to one another appear with imaginative frequency in the immortal work of Cervantes. .

Following, then, certain directions or keys contained in it, it would be appropriate to affirm that there are many historians and writers who suppose, possibly in a very correct way, that this place in La Mancha, which Cervantes did not want to remember, but which he said that there were between thirty and forty mills, it was, in reality, this beautiful town of Campo de Criptana.

Campo de Criptana, to be more exact, is located about thirty kilometers from Corral de Almaguer, near Alcázar de San Juan and barely fifteen kilometers from another town, where the productive imagination of Cervantes wanted to place Dulcinea, the lady of the dreams of the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote: El Toboso.

Returning to the subject and true or not, that this was the place that Cervantes did not want to allude to at the beginning of his work, as the inhabitants of Campo de Criptana say, it does seem to be, without any doubt, at least the place where the intrepid knight hit his bones on the ground when facing those 'giants', which were actually the windmills.

This is proven by the fact that Campo de Criptana is the only town in La Mancha, whose number of mills, thirty-two, coincided with the figure stated by Cervantes and this is confirmed by two historical relationships: one, belonging to King Felipe II and the another, to the Marqués de la Ensenada.

It is also true that of this immense power, barely more than a dozen mills currently survive, several of them going back, such as the one that responds by the name of 'the Infante' - in fact, it is one of those shown in the visits and its condition is impeccable, keeping many of its original pieces - to its origins, in the sixteenth century.

All of them are located in the highest part of the town, next to the oldest neighborhood and through which it is an experience and an adventure to walk: the Albaicín.

It could be said that the Albaicín is a whole labyrinth of narrow and mysterious streets, whose houses are dazzling with the whitewash that makes their walls white and that, seen in the distance, resemble a pale shroud that contrasts with the chromatic tones of the infinite La Mancha fields.

In fact, it could be said that it is the most authentic and remarkable thing in Campo de Criptana, the thing that leaves the best taste in the mouth of the traveler's cultural expectations and that which ultimately still tastes of adventure and that historical past water, which of course, in this case and varying the proverb a little, it can well be said that it does move mills.

Remarkable, likewise, is another of the curiosities that make Campo de Criptana, an adventure worth living: its cave houses.

Also located in the upper part of the town, on the edge of the mills and the Albaicín neighborhood, the cave houses are a fascinating attraction, whose vision is not only overwhelming, but they are also living witnesses of a time where the The need for a habitat to live in made men, somehow, return to the warm matrix of the earth.

As a culmination of this visit, add that Campo de Criptana was the birthplace of one of our most universal actresses and even one of the mills that can be visited contains a small museum dedicated to her: Sara Montiel.

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