PhD Program in Historical studies
On the trail of a damsel: Dulcinea of El Toboso
Don Quixote said to his squire, “Sancho, I love Dulcinea del Toboso so much, that she is the most noble princess of the earth for me.” (Don Quijote de la Mancha, Part I, Chapter XXV) .
El TobosoEl Toboso is a small town in the province of Toledo, in the Community of Castilla La Mancha. The only archaeological remains of the area date back to pre-Roman times, but the oldest written documents that relate to this town are from the fourteenth century. A century later, El Toboso came under the control of the Order of Santiago. Cervantes, however, was to make it famous, and it is still visited by those who want to know the place where the lady lived that Don Quijote fell in love with. of La Mancha is a small town that cannot be understood without reading the main work of Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha. Its fame is linked to the character of DulcineaDulcinea is the female character who falls in love with Don Quijote de la Mancha in the famous work of Cervantes. She lives with his parents Lorenzo Corchuelo and Aldonza Nogales in El Toboso, a town in La Mancha, and is described as a young woman of great beauty who works in the fields. However, in the imagination of Don Quijote, hopelessly in love with her, she is a lady of illustrious lineage., the lady with whom the delusional knight falls madly in love. The oldest evidence of the past of this town dates back to pre-Roman period, while in the Middle Ages, after the Reconquista, it became part of the territory repopulated by the Military Order of Santiago. In modern times, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, El Toboso experienced an increase in population and was built mostly of civil and religious Baroque buildings, that even today there are preserved. The traces of the Quijote and Cervantes appear on the streets of the country, with statues depicting Don Quixote and Dulcinea in the Plaza Mayor, and immerse themselves completely in the urban context formed by ancient streets and houses which are typical of La Mancha (image 1). Some sources report that Cervantes chose El Toboso as the birthplace of Dulcinea because Doña Ana de Zarco de Morales, a woman with whom the writer seems to have had an affair, lived there. Today you can visit the house of Dulcinea, a typical house where Doña Ana is supposed to have lived, converted into a museum with furniture and objects of the Baroque period typical of a small village of La Mancha.
Among the religious buildings that retain traces of their Baroque past and which are also mentioned in chapter 9 of the Quijote, it is worth dwelling on the church of Saint Anthony the Abbot, the town’s main church. On this building, Cervantes said, “Don Quijote […] saw a great tower, and later realized that it was not a palace, but the town’s main church.” The construction work had begun in 1525, on the plan of an older church. The exterior of monumental proportions is exactly as described by Cervantes, in the Isabelline Gothic styleIs an architectural and decorative style typical of the era of the Catholic Monarchs (1474-1516), which takes elements from the late Gothic and from the early Renaissance. It is, therefore, a transition style, to which is added, on some occasions, some decorative details drawn from Islamic art. The most representative building of the Isabelline Gothic is the Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo (Castilla La Mancha)., although the main entrance, under a rounded arch with pillars, dates from the early seventeenth century. Next to it stands the square tower erected in the sixteenth century, formed by three bodies and crowned by a balustrade decorated with spheres (image 2). Inside, the property has three naves covered with vaults that sustain large cylindrical columns. The side chapels dedicated to the Virgin, and the sacristy were built in the early seventeenth century.