Calle de Don Quijote

The knight of the sorrowful figure rides through Cuatro Caminos without ever leaving his novel. The street recalls Don Quixote, the gentleman Cervantes sent out onto the roads of La Mancha chasing giants that were windmills, and it belongs to a group of streets the neighbourhood dedicated to literature: on one side Dulcinea, his imagined lady; nearby, Cicerón. The irony is in the map: the two streets run parallel, about fifty metres apart, crossed by Hernani, Oviedo, Palencia and Jaén. They circle each other and never touch, like the knight and his beloved, who never met in the fiction either. In the 1920s this was undeveloped outskirts, ground for the modest brick houses that the residents themselves raised on the edges of the Ensanche de Castro. From that origin comes the character of Don Quijote: narrow, stepped, rising and falling, with no way through for cars toward Raimundo Fernández Villaverde.