Calle Daganzo

The name travels from the capital to a town in the northeast of the region, Daganzo, today officially Daganzo de Arriba. The “de Arriba” (Upper) came late, once it had to be told apart from a Daganzo de Abajo that emptied of people in the 19th century and whose land ended up divided among neighbouring municipalities. Before that, plain Daganzo was enough. Where the word comes from is less certain: one theory takes it to Arabic, in the sense of a course of bricks in a kiln; another traces it to a Celtiberian name recorded in a Roman inscription. Neither prevails. What did leave a mark was Cervantes, who chose the town for a short interlude in which some rustic candidates run for aldermen amid bluster and nonsense. He painted its people as coarse and drunken, and yet made them famous: today the town holds Cervantine festivities and dedicates a square to the writer who mocked it.