Calle Dulcinea

Here lives the most famous woman who never existed. Dulcinea del Toboso is the lady to whom Don Quixote devotes all his exploits in Cervantes’s novel. Behind the name is a farm girl, Aldonza Lorenzo, whom the knight transforms in his imagination into a peerless princess. She never appears on the page: she is an ideal, a love the knight never gets to touch. The distance carried over onto the map of Madrid. Calle de Dulcinea was named around 1875; Calle de Don Quijote did not arrive until 1887. The two run parallel through Cuatro Caminos, a few dozen metres apart, never crossing. Scattered through the barrio are other Cervantine neighbours, Sancho Panza, Rocinante and Cervantes himself, each on its corner, as if the whole novel had come apart page by page across the streets of Tetuán.