Description

Fermin Caballero was a geographer and statistician who became a minister of the interior, and he read Don Quixote the way a geographer reads: checking the distances. His conclusion, argued here with maps and itineraries, is that Cervantes was no vague fabulist of La Mancha but a man with precise knowledge of Spanish roads, leagues and terrain, who placed every inn and windmill where it could plausibly stand. The book made its reputation at once and has never quite been superseded; every later attempt to trace the routes of the knight starts from it. It also contains a curiosity: a diagram ranking Cervantes among the geographers, engraved as a wind rose.