Campo de Montiel does not suggest an arrival point, a place to go as a tourist destination to spend some days; it can be merely that (as a matter of fact, thousands of tourists visit us every year), but it is much more than that, because Campo de Montiel is a starting point in a crossroad and a junction of stories to go through and to tell; a place for contemplation towards action; the opportunity to start again. This is the way that it was understood by the most important writer in Castilian language, don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, when he made our Quixote depart from his village at dawn, on a Friday in July, in 15… and something, denying the certainties commonly accepted at his social status; abandoning his stew, his breeches and his sleepers; leaving the limits of his real state and riding again, like his ancestors did, through the unexplored land that is the origin of every novelty, renouncing to the nobility of his lineage, installed in the self satisfaction, even with the risk of looking apparently mad, to experience the true chivalry on the most common land ever imagined.
Because if it is universally known that the wandering knight don Quixote was from La Mancha, a poor and steppe region, although its wheat is the best in Spain, and its roads are plain and its villages are big and beautiful, what just a few know, or if they knew, they did not want to remember due to “Avellaneda’s influence” it is that the unnamed village in La Mancha, that is Don Quixote’s home village, is located in our Campo de Montiel, one of the poorest among the poorest districts in La Mancha, a land that inspires this website, and in former times, inspired Cervantes with his classic characters.
