In a place of La Mancha, whose name I would not like to remember...
Don Quixote, el Quijote, usually billed as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, is big tourist business in Castilla la Mancha and this weekend we took a short break based in Campo de Criptana a town where there a number of old style windmills just right for tilting at. In el Toboso, the village where el Quijote's imaginary lady Dulcinea lived we went to a small museum full of hundreds of copies of the various editions of the book, in every conceivable language, signed by the famous and infamous alike including names like Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Fuentes. On the museum wall a painting showed a thin bloke, lance in hand, riding a skinny horse and by his side a tubby man riding a mule. The four figures are dwarfed by a dazzling azure sky and the parched earth that stretch on and on for ever. We've crossed through la Mancha several times on our journeys to and from Madrid or up to Albacete. That painting tallied exactly with my impres...