A place in La Mancha called Consuegra

Inseparable from the landscape where the most universal of our knights-errant began his cabalistic adventures, the immortal Don Quixote of la Mancha, an unforgettable character born from the fertile imagination of one of the most prolific writers of the so-called Spanish Golden Age, Miguel de Cervantes, there are places that still preserve, as a heritage asset of the first magnitude, a good part of those old windmills, which, in addition to giving character to a legendary land, also play with the fertile imagination of those other knights-errant of all times , who, metaphorically and comparatively speaking, are the travelers.

Located just over a hundred kilometers from Madrid capital and framed within the territorial limits of a no less historic and legendary land, such as Toledo, Consuegra is one of those fortunate towns from La Mancha, settled on the edge of an environment On whose high mountains stand out, visible from a distance, a reasonable number of windmills, which, together with the unmistakable silhouette of a medieval fortress that still retains a good part of its ancient grandeur and whose roots, according to archaeological dating carried out over the years, they date it back, at least, to the initial era of the Caliphate of Córdoba.

Although there are historians, however, who insist on seeing, in the first stages of this superb castle of La Mancha, the hand of the Roman emperor, Trajan, going back many centuries, to that time of imperial conquest in which the Roman legions remained continually confronted by the warlike Celtiberian tribes of that distant Hispania, among which the Arévaci stood out for their special ferocity.

In this castle, moreover, Diego Rodríguez, the son of another of our most universal knights, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Cid Campeador, died fighting against the Almoravids, of whom it has been said, as a sentence for the different leaders who they have been ruling the country since the dawn of time, that famous phrase: 'what a good vassal for such a bad lord'.

The castle also played an important role in housing part of the troops that participated in the famous battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, also known as the Battle of the Three Kings, which took place in 1212 in the foothills of Port of Despeñaperros, which It marked the beginning of the end of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.

And although, historically speaking, the castle and the town of Consuegra housed one of the main orders of the Order of Saint John of the Hospital of Jerusalem, as an added curiosity, a copy of the statutes was also found among the objects inside originals of the Order of the Temple, a detail, among others, that has led numerous sources to advocate for a presence of these enigmatic knights, which has never been proven.

But Consuegra has, in addition to the castle and some windmills, in perfect condition and that preserve the reference names of some characters from Cervantes' work, such as that of the Knight of the Green Gaban - who, in some way, recalls the adventures of the famous knight Sir Gawain against that other Green Knight who represented the Celtic pagan tradition, in the spectacular sagas of King Arthur and the Holy Grail - other artistic details of interest, such as the spectacular churches, in Mudejar style, Saint Mary and Saint John the Baptipts or the no less spectacular church, this one, however, in neo-baroque style, of the Holy Christ of the True Cross.

It is, precisely, around these magnificent artistic exponents, that summarize, in their execution and era, the evolution of different architectures, on which the different streets of a town are grouped and consolidated, whose rural architecture, in addition, has also been evolving, although without ever losing, or at least not too much, the eminently traditional character of the immortal towns of La Mancha: those same people who one day saw the figure of Don Quixote pass by.

To all this, we must also add the presence, in the place, of numerous inns, in which the traveler can appreciate something that also caught the attention of our most illustrious writers, such as Azorín: the excellence of traditional La Mancha food.

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